Meek heritage

MEEK HERITAGE

By the same Author

FALLEN ASLEEP WHILE
YOUNG

F. E. SILLANPM

MEEK HERITAGE

Translated, from the Finnish by
ALEXANDER MATSON

PUTNAM

42 Great Russell Street, London, W.G. 1

HURSKAS KURJUUS, by F. E.
Sillanpaa, Kustannusosakeyhtio Otava,
Helsingfors.

MEEK HERITAGE first published in
England , May 1938.

Printed in Great Britain by

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Prelude

.

. i

L

Birth and Childhood

.

4

II.

The Poor Relation .

>

• 58

III.

Towards Manhood .

.

• 95

IV.

The Heart of Life .

.

. 123

V.

Death Does its Best .

.

• 171

VI.

The Rebel

. 2 X 0

MEEK HERITAGE

PRELUDE

Jussi—or Juha or Janne—Toivola—according to
the church register Johan Abraham Benjamin’s-
son—was a repulsive-looking old fellow. During
the latter part of his life he was entirely bald
except for a fringe of hair, clipped on some
unknown past date, that stuck out under his cap
over his ears and at his neck. His face, too, was
covered with a mongrel growth of tangled hair;
only the sharp nose was clearly visible. This was
because hair grew round his eyes as well, and as
the peak of his cap cast a shadow, one saw in
that region of his face only two sunken harsh
points of light into which no decent person
cared to look.

One meets occasionally with persons whose
glance is instinctively avoided, but usually for
entirely different reasons than in the case of
Jussi Toivola. In his eyes there was nothing
awe-inspiring; the expression in them could
rather be construed as an attempt at a smile;
but there was a hint of insanity in them, and the
hardest test to which a man can subject his
strength of mind is to look long into the smiling
eyes of a lunatic, for their smile seems, in a spirit
of fellow-feeling, to be suggesting awareness of
what one would not at any price admit existed

B

2

MEEK HERITAGE

in oneself. One half expects the demented old
woman before one suddenly to say something
of the kind aloud for all to hear. . . .

Jussi Toivola, to be sure, was no lunatic;
withered though his brain may have been, there
was nothing wrong with its balance. The
farmers in the locality actually regarded him as
a cunning rogue and skilful agitator. And when
it became known that he had been involved
during the rebellion in a gross murder, judgment
was pronounced on him without further ado.
The officer entrusted with the task of cleaning
up the district put an end to his life one spring
night together with the lives of eight others of
his ilk.

The effect of the death sentences on the slack
local population, which had not foreseen such
an eventuality, was on the whole mildly stupe¬
fying. Almost, voices tended to tremble when¬
ever the subject cropped up during those first
few days. But in Jussi Toivola’s last moments
there was one minor incident that irresistibly
provoked laughter because it was somehow so
typical of him. The rebels were shot in a grave
dug ready for them in the graveyard, and Jussi
chanced to be the last. Whereupon instead of
remaining standing he lay down on the pile of
corpses—to save trouble like. Wasn’t that Jussi
all over ? Only he was not shot lying down, but
ordered to get on to his feet.

PRELUDE

3

“ In war one has to enjoy killing —if war is not
to be a failure,” a Finnish warrior of the inkpot
has written—the italics are his—apparently with
truth.

But war, in an exact sense, is nothing in itself;
it is a certain fleeting relationship between
individual and collective fates. It passes, but
the fates involved are treasures achieved, in which
respect they are equal. Very soon after the
battles an individual human soul can attain to
a moment when the eye no longer, even by an
effort of will, halts at the inessential surface, at
the physical exertions, the dirt, the hunger and
cruelties, but penetrates irresistibly deeper, where
all are as though petrified and still in their
various attitudes. There no one is nobler or
more justified than another, for through the
agency of the warring parties circumstances
have clashed of which the fighters have no
inkling. The dead arise and wonder why they
have been buried in this fashion in separate
graves; they cannot at all remember what
meaning attaches to this discrimination. Jussi
Toivola and the officer are old acquaintances;
somewhere on a clear night the officer once shot
Jussi. It must certainly have happened in a
very offhand manner, as he failed entirely at the
time to notice how important a man Jussi in
reality is. . . -

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

Jussi Totvola came of landowning stock, though
few among the present younger generation were
ever aware of this circumstance, for of what
interest were the remote phases of his past to
anybody, that they should inquire about them?

E 7J n ^ ow there are highly-thought-of kinsmen
of his living two or three , parishes away, though
Jussi to be sure was so thoroughly estranged
from them that he never even thought of them

wiien his revolutionary activities brought him
into peril. °

He was born in a certain South-west Finland
pamh on a farm called Nikkila in the village of

SaT k r ga V n , the year l857 ' His birtb took
place on a Fnday evening before Michaelmas.

I be atmosphere peculiar to the eve of that

hourif Val / 3 t alr ? dy StTOng in the farm -

strangelv d 7 ar . ds that da ^ mingling with the
radiate fr °^ ln ® atmosphere that seems to

child ithL a WOn i? ab ° Ut t0 give birth t0 a
- It had rained heavily all the morning but

th : ““y-tinted birch and aspen woods
and the revtved green of solitary spruLtrlT

4

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 5

The master of Nikkila, Penjami, a drooping
man of fifty with a tobacco-stained jaw, came on
unsteady feet down the steps leading from the
attic to the yard. He was dressed in a soiled
burlap blouse, long and gathered in with a
leather belt, but the blouse and his shirt were
unfastened at the top, leaving a large expanse
of bony red chest exposed to the autumn air.
Patently a man slowly drifting to ruin; an old
farmer in that state, blouse-clad in the farmyard,
and a brandy-still bubbling away in a shed, these
blended harmoniously with the spirit of the place
as revealed in the worn corners and smelly found¬
ations of the house. Penjami had married thrice
and now his third wife was about to give birth to
her first child. The cupper-woman, her arms
bare and her face sweating, was carrying water
to the bath-house. When she saw Penjami set
off towards the village she shouted:

“You keep at home this evening, old
man! ”

“ And you, old hags, keep to your own
mangers,” Penjami growled and strode on in
the direction of the village, on his flushed aged
face a self-satisfied smile that reflected both the
placid daylight without and the equally placid
secret thoughts of an old man within.

e . . . women bear children . . . women are
like that, always having children . . . this very
minute my third wife will be giving birth to a

MEEK HERITAGE

6

child, but that cupper-woman, she won’t have
any more . . . eh, eh, eh, boys. . . .

. . I’m off to Ollila, to see old man Ollila . . .
not a bad sort, if he does come from Kokcmaki.
Drunk as often as I am, shouldn’t wonder if he
isn’t drunk now, and what’s to stop him, him with
a great strapping boy like the hindquarter of a
bear . . . and always plenty of rye. The devil
never gets any poorer, even with all that mash.
... I, I’ve got a third wife already and a child
coming again . . . cupper-woman bossing the
place, but I’ll soon stop women at their games. . . .
Feels good to put women in their place . . . every
one of my wives has tasted the stick and this
one’ll get hers soon. . . .’

In Penjami’s veins the spirits he had dru nk
coursed at their sweetest; his cheeks glowed like
bunches of rowan-berries, his eyes sought some¬
thing near at hand on which he could vent his
good humour. He tried to start a quarrel with
some potato-pickers and asked Husari’s brat:

“ Is your father at home? ”

“ Yes,” answered the boy.

“ What’s he doing there? ”

“ Don’t know.”

“ He’ll be beside your mother,” said Penjami,
chuckling with laughter as he turned on to the
track leading to Ollila.

The name of this third wife of Penj ami’s was

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 7

Maija. By birth she was a daughter of the very
farm he was about to visit; that is to say, she was
not this present Kokemaki man’s girl; her
brother had sold Ollila to him. Having made
up his mind to marry into a farm on the other
side of Tampere, her brother had no use for their
old home and so sold it. That left his sister
Maija sitting on a very weak branch indeed.
She had a few roubles of her own, but nobody
seemed to want them. The feeble attempts she
made to bedeck herself and cut a figure only
awakened laughter; there was something comical
in them, and in the end the community saw to it
that they were fittingly punished: Maija gave
birth to an illegitimate child. The baby died
quickly enough, but by then the roubles were all
spent and the only road for Maija was that always
open to women. She went into service as a
maid. People prophesied new falls from grace
for Maija, for she was a weak-willed person.
These prophecies, however, were not fulfilled.
But when the mistress at Nikkila died about
Michaelmas and Maija went there that same
autumn as maid, people said, “ Well, there’s
Penjami’s next wife.” And this time they were
right. Maija lay now on the bath-house platform
at Nikkila with Loviisa, the cupper-woman,
fussing in attendance on her.

It was an occasion she had fervently hoped and
waited for; her life up to now and especially

MEEK HERITAGE

8

her mistresshood had been a fumbling and in¬
harmonious affair and it had entered her weak
little brain that if she were to present her hus¬
band with an heir, that would enable her to get
properly started. What had been lacking in her
life so far was a proper start, and the lack of
that was clearly not her fault. How could she
be to blame for the fact that her life had somehow
failed to follow the lines laid down for the lives
of farmers’ daughters ? She had been in service
for five years without feeling her new status a
degradation; it was merely something temporary,
carrying on until she got properly started. She
fell in at once with Penjami’s hints: to Maija
there was something almost pleasing in the fact
that the master was what he was, old, tobacco-
stained about the chin, fond of drink—and a
widower. In feeling this, no idea of her own
lowly state flitted through her mind; it was only
that she felt they were a fitting couple for this
particular farm.

That, however, was her mood only during the
time when she knew for certain that she was to
become a lawful wife and had a whole week in
which to let her fancy dwell on the announce¬
ment next Sunday in church that “ the farmer
Penjami Penjami’s-son, widower, and the young
maiden, the farmer’s daughter Maria Josefina
Sefania’s-daughter. . . .” Only what the parson
did announce was “ maidservant on the same

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 9

farm ”—not a word about any young maiden.
And in other respects, too, Maija was soon to
notice that even now she had not got properly
started. Indeed, marriage brought about hardly
any change whatever in her condition. She
could not bring herself to address Penjami by
any other name than master, and the girls called
her Maija as before. The master, again, used
the contemptuous term “ old hags 5 5 to convey
his feeling for women in general; when he was
in a specially good humour he said “ women¬
folk.”

The same everlasting nameless anxiety that
had weighed on Maija while she was hoping to
become a wife, continued after her marriage.
The proper start had always to be postponed.
Things ought to have been so-and-so and so-
and-so, but it all had to be put off for to-morrow.
One modest attempt at asserting herself she
made: she was rude to the cupper-woman in
the hope that the woman would keep away from
the house. But the result was that the master
came home one day in a vile temper and shouted,
“ If you old hags—cows—don’t mind your own

business, I’ll-” Penjami seemed to draw on

the whole force of his alarming oldness and ugli¬
ness and proclaim his superiority to all old hags.
Penj ami’s life had not suffered from the lack of a
proper start; Maija had to respect him. And
the cupper-woman on her part showed that she

10 MEEK HERITAGE

bore no malice; almost she was more friendly to
Maija than before.

It began to look as though, after all, there was
not going to be any better start for Maija. In
solitary moments between her heavy tasks she
sometimes grasped that she was already well on
in years, cast up on this kind of farm . . . with
Penj ami’s flushed old man’s face and drink-
sodden mind, long since settled in its mould,
unshakable whatever might happen, for highest
authority. And somewhere in between were the
cupper-woman and daughters with their own
private knowledge, and for spectators the sur¬
rounding grey village. So apparently it would
go on. . . . Such moments of musing made the tip
of her nose droop ever lower; two of her front
teeth had already fallen out. Suppose Penj ami
were to die, what would become of her, with no
heir and so far no hope of one?

Then came the promise of an heir. During
that period of waiting Maija’s watering eyes often
gazed out dreamily from between her pallid
cheekbones. Now an heir was on the way; but
to that circumstance attached so much compulsory
planning—she had to look ahead. The child
would have to be nursed and brought up, care
taken that its inheritance increased and was not
wasted. Each time such thoughts crowded un¬
bidden into Maija’s mind, she felt worried.
Anything resembling organized planning oppressed

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD II

and wearied her; she saw in her mind’s eye
successful and necessary good results, but felt
at the same time that these called for calculated
efforts and a small steady stream of energy.
Maija had already experienced a thousand
thousand little hardships in her time; nothing
had ever really gone off in her case as it should
have done And now there were Eeva and Marke
and Penjami’s oldness and all the rest. Why
hadn’t even her marriage been like that of other
girls? Not to have to make any effort, that was
what one had to arrive at.

Nature, meanwhile, took no notice of such
demands, but went on with its own work. The
absolute, exacting continuity of nature on the
one hand, and human hopes on the other, the
core of all life’s tragedy, were as much in evidence
also in these circumstances as a flower grows true
to its species in the loneliest nook of the most
god-forsaken wilds. But when her hour was
upon her, the uncomfortable pressure of Maija’s
many worries relaxed for a time. She had a
sense of arriving at an ideal state. All the Eevas
and Markes, the Penjamis and cupper-women
—what did they matter?

A tallow candle burned in the room off the
bakery at Ollila, and in its yellowish light three
men were sitting. Pa Ollila is a man in his
sixties, with clean-shaven cheeks and a dense

12

MEEK HERITAGE

white fringe of beard stretching from ear to ear
under his chin. He speaks his own Kokemaki
dialect and holds his neck and the trunk of his
body always stiffly upright. There is dignity
even in the way he drains his glass, and when
Penjami starts to get skippy and tease him, Pa
crushes him with calm remorselessness, and
Penjami is afraid to pick a quarrel. For at
Pa’s side, equally stiff and immobile, is his son
Franssu, a sturdy bob-haired man in his twenties.
Franssu, too, lets slip a sentence now and again,
gravely, never with a smile. When he speaks, he
speaks for himself, yet somehow his remarks
always confirm what Pa has last uttered. They
drink without becoming intoxicated. Here on
their own ground they seem between them to be
making Penjami dance to their tune, Penjami
who is such a tyrant at home.

Kokemaki men have begun to settle in the
parish, one here, another there. They are
broad-chested, callously disregardful of the pro¬
prieties of life in the locality. Dressed in their
shawls and sheepskin coats they call loudly to one
another in their own harsh dialect even outside
the church.

The candle is nearly at its last flicker, and so is
Penjami Nikkila.

“Seems like you can only last out a tallow
dip,.. says Pa Ollila. At the point where Pen-
jami is beginning to be hazy, Pa is only beginning

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 13

to warm up. “ And it’s no use you bearing spite
against me because I wouldn’t give you that
money. How did I know what kind of place
you had? . . . and I’ll say it again, going and
getting married the way you did. ...”

In his drink-fuddled mind Penjami sensed the
gulf between him and these men, the aggravating
superior strength of their personality. It was as
though he and his farm with him were already
passing into their hands without their even
willing that it should be so. Signs of an instinc¬
tive irritation began to show in Penjami. He got
up as though intending to do something about it.
But at that Pa rose to his feet.

“ You get off home with you, neighbour,”
he said, “ and see to your wife. I’m thinking
she’ll be giving you a little one this very
minute.”

Pa and Franssu led Penjami out. He found
himself in the pitch-dark yard and began making
his way, step by step, towards the other end of
the village. His eyes stared into the darkness,
and as the drink had wiped out all consciousness
of his everyday routine, he saw only the stark
fundamental features of his life and circumstances
in all their unsavouriness. This earth and
yonder sky and those Kokemaki men, no amount
of evil temper could prevail against them.
Against all else bad temper has helped. Dread¬
fully sickening to feel that things exist that cannot

MEEK HERITAGE

14

be overcome by a fighting temper and cannot be
ignored. Old Penjami was nigh to being crushed
by an obstinate suspicion that there might be
things to compel his respect.

He growled in his throat and sat down by the
roadside. ,

A tiny wooden torch burns in its holder on the
living-room wall at Nikkila; its light falls on the
two red-haired daughters, Eeva, the older, and
Marke, the younger. Both are the offspring of
Penjami’s second marriage, the sole surviving
offspring, and take after their mother in appear¬
ance. They have a stolid air and are sparing of
speech even when alone together, yet they always
seek each other’s company. This evening the
bond of sympathy between them is particularly
strong, for all the evening they have had the
living-room in which their infancy was spent to
themselves. With the mistress away and the
master away the servants are not likely to stay at
home, for this is the season of the year for hirings
and sprees. Only the crickets cry continuously
in the cracks of the big brick fireplace and from
the splitwood fire the bark gives a ghostly rustle
as it curls into ashes. Right under the torch-clip
Marke sits, mumbling the words of her long
narrow Catechism; farther away Eeva treads
her spinning-wheel. Each time Eeva stops to
move the thread to the next groove, Marke stops

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 15

reading and would like to say something, but as
her sister sets the spinning-wheel whirring again
at once, she wets her finger and goes on reading.
Marke is still a little childish, unconfirmed,
whereas Eeva is nearly grown-up.

The sole materials of which their mood is
composed are the happenings in their litde lives
and surroundings. When summer wanes, torches
are lit in the evenings and winter is nigh. They
see this repeated year after year and meanwhile
find themselves growing up. Mother died the
autumn before last, about this time; Maija now
makes herself at home in the house, goes freely to
the storerooms and attics and is going to have a
baby; father is always drunk. The nicest time
was the year after mother’s death; father was
nearly always away and when he came home he
did not beat them as he used to beat mother.
Eeva had the keys and clung to them so well that
the cupper-woman got very little at that time
even though she was always prowling around the
farm. The cupper-woman talks familiarly to
father and has never been afraid of him even
when he is angry.

Marke let the book sink to her lap and tried to
talk to her sister.

“ Where’s father again? ”

“ At Ollila, I suppose.”

“Why is Loviisa always here? Why is she
always laughing like that at father? ”

MEEK HERITAGE

16

“ The cupper-woman’s been his sweetheart
once.”

“ Yes, but why is she still here when Maija’s
here as well? And what right has Maija to act
as she does here? ”

“ She’s the mistress.”

“ Mother was the mistress.”

“ Yes, and now it’s Maija and she’s just going
to get a baby, so now you know.”

“ How’ll she get that? And why is she getting
it in the bath-house? ” Marke persisted.

“ Ask Maija,” was all the reply she got from
her elder sister.

“ When are you going to get a baby? ”

“ Pooh, on the big to-morrow when the cherries
ripen,” Eeva answered with a tired smile, and
rising, she put aside the spinning-wheel, yawned
and fingered her hair.

The Nikkila girls, small-eyed and red-haired,
left all by themselves in the farmhouse, began
boredly to prepare for bed. Maija and the
cupper-woman Loviisa were still in the bath¬
house, Penjami the master still somewhere in the
village. One can well believe that on that pitch-
dark night, when the only sound outside was an
occasional bellow from a drunken farm-hand in
the village, these three groups of human beings
unconsciously withdrew deeper away from each
other into their several shells. Eeva put out the
torch, closed the smoke-shutter and lay down

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 17

nearest the wall on the creaky bed behind the
fireplace, where Marke was waiting to snuggle
down tightly beside her. Eeva let it happen,
though she didn’t much like it.

From the porch came the sound of hasty foot¬
steps. The cupper-woman went into the master’s
room, then into the bakery, opened the door to
the living-room and was off again. A male
child had already arrived in the world and had
been bathed and swaddled. While the cupper-
woman was fetching a basket, the mother made
the sign of the cross over its chest with her hand,
muttering a mixture of prayer and incantation.
Then with a sigh she lay down again, in her
mind and limbs an unaffected sense of happiness
and languor. In those moments fear and exer¬
tion were absent; for a space she could be
alone with her child in the silence of the bath¬
house.

A mysterious being one hour old breathed
audibly in its basket in the Nikkila bath-house on
the eve of Michaelmas Saturday in a remote
dark corner of the earth sixty years before the
Red Rebellion. Not a very propitious hour to
be born in, if not specially unpropitious; the
circumstances were common enough.

In the living-room Eeva wakened to the
sound of her father stumbling towards his bed.
She woke up a second time to hear him grumbling
about something until a voice from the bed near
c

MEEK HERITAGE

18

the door said, “ Stop that nagging now, old
fellow, or if I get up to you you’ll sure do so.”

The voice was that of the farm-hand Aapeli,
who had also come home late.

The old man did shut up for a while, but then
got up again and muttering to himself went into
the porch, where he could be heard calling for
Loviisa. The farm-boy giggled in his bed. All
this Eeva heard distinctly, finding nothing unusual
in it. Marke heard nothing, but slept soundly
on, snuggling ever closer to Eeva, apparently, in
her sleep, mistaking Eeva for her mother.

Maija had had her own reasons for hoping for
the birth of a child, and after its birth she had
experienced those solemn moods which nature
herself brings as a gift. But no sooner arc those
moods over than the almighty everyday emerges
again, and then the birth of a child is usually
seen as something respectable folk accept without
murmuring and endure with patience; as one
of those burdens which life invariably brings with
it in one form or another and which lend to
human life its grey and slightly wearisome
flavour. Should the child die in its infancy its
death is more an occasion for rejoicing than its
birth had been. The mother sheds tears, but
openly admits them to be tears of joy.

When she was not with the child Maija always
remembered that its survival was a matter of

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD IQ

importance to her. The thought would then
sometimes flash into her mind that Penjami
cared nothing for the child; at such moments
new feelings would awake in Maija’s breast
towards Penjami. These feelings even began to
shine through the exchanges of words between
husband and wife. Maija tried instinctively on
these occasions to retain the coyly railing tone
struck during their courtship, but alone with
Penjami she might recklessly, in bursts of coarse
humour, address him familiarly as “ thou.”
This mode of address seemed somehow to appeal
to Penjami; Maija had a feeling that her value
and influence were on the increase.

So long as little Jussi was helpless and incapable
of adventuring around alone, one day was pretty
much like another for him. An old battered
cradle stood in the far corner of the living-room.
The two-year-old boy lay there in the dusk of
evening with his feet in his step-sister Marke’s
lap, who had seated herself across the foot end
of the cradle. The knots standing out high in
the worn floor make the cradle bump as Marke,
listlessly crooning, rocks it. The boy will not
fall asleep. Every now and again he tries to sit
up and cries for his mother, and each time Marke
thrusts him down. The child is tormented by
the growing darkness and the fleas and bedbugs.

After the boy has risen wailing into a sitting

20

MEEK HERITAGE

position for the twentieth time, Marke at last
struggles to her feet and lifts him out of the cradle,
gathering his bowed legs into her arms, and takes
him to the window, where a faint daylight still
hovers. Seeing people moving in the dusk beside
the well and cowhouse door the child grows
calmer. Then it falls to wailing again in a steady
low tone. A door bangs outside, indoors a cricket
creaks, the faithful household spirit of those days,
the age of the wooden torch. Marke is by now
bored with her own boredom. She gazes with a
complete absence of feeling at the tear-stained
twisted face in her arms; ‘ Maija’s son; father is
its father, too. . . .’

The men come into the living-room, Aapeli
and Kustaa the farm-boy. Mastomaki, the day-
labourer, can be seen passing through the gate
homeward. Maija’s footsteps sound in the porch
and die away in the direction of the bakery.
The evening has begun.

After Aapeli has doffed his blouse and spread
out his gauntlets and wet rag foot-wrappings on
the fireplace to dry, he reaches down a bundle
of torches from the rafters, finds a match, strikes
it on the plastered fireplace and lights the torches.
The child ceases its low wailing and blinks its
eyelids. It is exhausted, but gives a scream the
moment Marke tries to set it down in the cradle.

Aapeli has brought out the makings of a sleigh.
Kustaa dozes on the bench, idle until expressly

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 21

told to do something. Now Maija, the mistress,
comes into the living-room and snatches up Jussi
in her stride to her breast to suckle. Going on
for three years old, Jussi has not yet been weaned.
Maija has quite simply put off weaning him.

Maija knows her duties as mistress. She orders
Kustaa and Marke to practise their reading.
Kustaa goes to fetch his Catechism, but Marke
hesitates. “ You wait till your father comes,”
threatens Maija.

Kustaa has just got well into his drone:
“ Answer, the old Adam who still dwelleth within
us every day—er-er—repentance and improve¬
ment—er-er—and all evil lusts—er—shall be
drowned and—and each day rise again—er—
when Aapeli, who wants a good light for the
joint he is fitting together, growls at him, “ Boy,
come and hold a light.”

The hiss of a plane, the humming of a spinning-
wheel, gabbled lines from the Catechism. Pen-
jami himself has come into the living-room with
a bundle of torchwood under his arm and begun
to whittle torches. He has been sober all day,
and on such days the others cannot help noting a
certain dignity in him.

A couple of hours later these people of diverse
ages are all asleep. Around them sighs the end¬
less, gloomy night of the backwoods, like a single
living entity watching over ignorant human
beings struggling helplessly in the sea of Time.

22

MEEK HERITAGE

The fateful ’sixties have dawned, yet of the
dwellers in this house, cast by accident into each
other’s company, not one has an car to divine
from the cricket’s chirping the coming fateful
events of those years. Seven separate breathings
only steadily assert their right to draw on and
give to the joint atmosphere of the room.

The breathing of the youngest is almost
inaudible. Little Jussi has at last fallen asleep
in his mother’s lap and been lowered into the
stale-smelling cradle. There the tiny body lies
with all its various parts, it too struggling uncon¬
sciously onward along the sea of Time towards its
distant prime and still more distant old age and
a death envisaged by none, after which all shall
still be as before, the shore of that endless sea
still invisible. Flesh, blood, and hidden inside,
bones. But for this particular tiny combination
the journey towards death is irksome from the
outset. In the invisible cells of the tiny bones a
process is already going on, of which no one sees
more than the results, the gradual curving of the
thigh-bones, the lumpy skull. And as the dark¬
ness becomes settled a bed-bug darts with in¬
credible agility from a corner of the cradle and
speeds along the coverlet until it finds what it is
seeking.

Messages of all these matters keep on arriving
in the fragile chambers of the brain. When these
messages become agitated a distant voice begins

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 23

to sound, its waves penetrating into the mys¬
terious activities of all the other brains. But
only in one brain does it waken a response.

Maija gets up from her place beside the snoring
Penjami, rubbing her inflamed eyes and scratch¬
ing her ribs, to rock little Jussi. Jussi, however,
is not appeased, but wails louder and tosses on
his pallet. At that Maija bends over the cradle
with impatient movements to give him suck.
When will the day dawn when she will have to
wean him? A feeling of surfeit fills Maija’s mind
as in that heavy midnight hour she feels the boy
draw greedily the meagre juice from her breast.
Too tiring in the long run. And she knows that
the farm is saddled with debts.

The boy calms down again—for a little while
—and a thousand unseen outward and inward
influences continue their work, slowly, slowly
modelling the tiny being into a human indi¬
vidual. Maija stretches herself out with a sigh
on the bed beside Penjami. Kustaa talks in his
sleep. Then all is silence save for the breathing
of the sleepers. On the ledge of the fireplace a
cricket gnaws at the cover of a Catechism that
has been left there.

Those days left in Jussi’s mind only sensory
impressions: a ray of sunlight or moonlight on
the floor, scolding voices, the crackle of a burning
torch. Then came a day when a Christmas scene,

MEEK HERITAGE

24

with a canopy of straw suspended from the ceiling,
straw on the floor, candles and hymns, became
imprinted on his mind. The first really con¬
secutive memories, however, that were to remain
permanently in his mind related to the following
events.

He was alone in the big living-room. At the
moment he had no definite wish to go anywhere.
He had just come from the bakery, where his
mother had given him half a cup of coffee.
People said of him that he was turned five. He
was a boy. Sitting on the floor he stared at the
windows and window-frames. Something seemed
to have stopped. Or rather it was as though he
had just become aware of something that had
always been. Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday. . . .

The clatter of footsteps came from the porch
and the next minute Penjami—father—was in
the room. Old Penjami and little Jussi face to
face; inevitably a momentary unconscious rela¬
tion formed between the two. A secret inner
man unknown to anybody awoke in the depths of
Penjami’s being; he seemed to be watching a shy
wild animal creeping forth from some ambush.
He has got to do something to that boy. He
looks smiling at the child, seizes him and lifts
him on to the ledge of the fireplace.

In his pocket are a few baked turnips. He
brings out one and orders the boy to take a bite.
The boy obeys, uncertain whether he likes or

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 25

dislikes what is happening to him. He recog¬
nizes the familiar smell of spirits and tobacco
and sees Penjami’s hairy face from an unusual
angle, level with his own face. A rather dreadful
being, father. . . . The incalculable being is still
smiling and doing things. It takes the plug out
of its cheek and in slow deliberate fun pokes it
into Jussi’s mouth. The boy is afraid to resist,
to hit out; his mouth twists into a peevish howl.
To sodden old Penjami it brings a tiny sickening
pleasure. Maija’s boy. ... A strange brutal
desire to do something wicked to Maija as well
awakes in him. He cannot quite remember
whether he has ever given Maija a proper beating.
What with having two wives before her it is hard
to remember which got what. . . .

Maija comes into the living-room just as Pen¬
jami is forcibly thrusting his tobacco-smelling
finger into the boy’s mouth. She draws nearer,
intending to lift the boy down.

“What are you up to now again—drunk? ”
she asks.

“ Nicely, old hag! ” Penjami roars in his
hollow old man’s voice, in which the rage is
patently feigned, and pushes Maija away.

“ Swilier, what do you think you’re going to
live on next year? Will you let the boy down! ”

“ Hell’s cow, are you going to hold your jaw,”
snarls Penjami turning fiercely to Maija.

Jussi takes advantage of the diversion to jump

MEEK HERITAGE

26

down from the fireplace, his heels jarring on the
floor, and rubbing his lips he darts out into the
yard. Evening is drawing nigh. The cupper-
woman’s husband Taavetti is coming through
the gate with a birch-bark basket under his arm,
his lips pursed in the intent expression of a short¬
sighted man.

“ Father at home? ” he croaks.

Jussi does not answer. In Taavetti’s memory
Jussi is hereafter fixed as a wicked brat. Taa¬
vetti is bringing tobacco-leaves for the master of
Nikkila, whose own tobacco was nipped by the
frost.

A little later Jussi sneaks back into the living-
room.

“ You’ve got a good old hag too,” Penjami is
remarking, the basket open on his knee. “ I
know your old hag better than you’ve ever known
her, hey, what? ”

“ I’ll lay you two have your own knowings,”
squeaks Taavetti. “ But can you say, master,
what we’re going to live on next winter? ”

“ Never mind about that, I’m talking about
your old hag. Ever given her a good beating,
eh?”

Maija comes into the living-room. Penjami
casts a glance in her direction and catches sight
of Jussi.

“ Eh, is the lout still here? I’ll give him some
tobacco.” Penjami’s voice, however, sounds

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 27

good-natured, and Jussi therefore only moves
nearer the door. Maija goes out again, slamming
the door behind her.

“ What? I’ll-” bursts out Penjami, getting

up. Nevertheless he does not follow her, but
sinks down slowly on to the bench again with a
wrathful air.

Taavetti makes a new attempt.

“ Oh, ay, the poor will need to do some
knowing next winter—I suppose you did manage
to cut a little rye at Nikkila.”

“Don’t snivel; come and have a drink,”
barks out Penjami. Taavetti follows him; a
drink is something to the good, even if he is
put out at his failure to get the old man to join
in his lamentations about the bad crops. They
go upstairs to the attic.

This chain of events and the impressions left
by it remained clear in Jussi’s memory; right to
the end of his life he would sometimes catch the
feel of that afternoon in all its original vividness.

That same evening the cupper-woman’s chil¬
dren came to Nikkila. Jussi was naughty to them;
he spat on the boy and when the victim ran to
tell his father he was near to getting a thrashing.
The evening was one long confusion, but some¬
how solemn. Later, Loviisa came to fetch
Taavetti. Taavetti had by then to be sup¬
ported home. Loviisa handled him in a very
matter-of-fact way; she did not mind people

MEEK HERITAGE

28

noticing and commenting on her rule of her
husband. So long as Loviisa was able to get
about there would be no starving in that
home.

The natural order of things was already
breaking up at that time. The first serious
failure of the crops had hit large areas of Fin¬
land hard. But in the ’sixties the horizons of
the sea of Time in which all these different people
were being rocked were very, very limited.

During the years that came before the great
famine-period Maija Nikkila’s boy Jussi was one
of the troop of children that played in the
Harjakangas lanes. A big head surmounted his
thin neck; the smock left his bow-legs visible.
His mouth tended to be always open and his
small, hardish eyes often stared unwinkingly
around him.

A rocky mound with many folds thrust into the
heart of the village. It was the common pas¬
turage. for the village pigs, Pig Hill, and the
favourite resort of the smallest children. One
dilapidated hut with a few apple-trees growing
beside it stood on one slope, and big rowans
grew here and there. The hut housed a family
with many children, later to become notorious as
the Pig Hill lot, the boys all vagrants and rowdies,
the girls ill-famed in many ways. There were
children also on the Husari and Pelttari Farms,

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 29

the cupper-woman had two, and at Nikkila
there was Jussi.

In the matter of clothing there was little to dis¬
tinguish boys from girls. Boys, too, wore loose
unbelted smocks until they were about ten. In
summer many a child of five still ran about clad
only in a shirt, its hair streaming freely. Boys
had their hair clipped at the ends, so that from
some way off they appeared to be wearing in¬
verted bowls on their heads. When they climbed
the rowans and hung head downward from the
branches, the bowls broke up into tangled manes.
On clear autumn evenings a group of this kind
might be sighted in silhouette from the lonely
lane along which the cupper-woman trudged
home from Nikkila and where stiff-backed Pa
Ollila sometimes took a stroll.

The children led a wild, adventurous life;
each evening was the close of a long phase of life,
the abundance of which later gave rise to the
feeling that this period of their lives had been
longer than any later period of like measure.
The contents of those days the children were at
perfect liberty to chose for themselves out of
whatever their senses and budding intelligence
could find to snatch at between heaven and earth.

One great world was everywhere above and
against them—the grown-up world. In that
world were included the fields and lands, houses
and even animals. Everywhere these concealed

MEEK HERITAGE

30

the intentions and purposes of grown-ups, pur¬
poses the children were compelled to serve as
soon as they were capable of doing so. Grown¬
ups moved through the lanes, went into the fields
carrying implements, came back again, were
usually grave, sometimes drunk and always
incredibly contrary in regard to anything a child
found important. No grown-up person ever
climbed to the summit of Pig Hill. Grown-ups
were one of the mysterious problems of nature,
always to be feared because now and again they
“ brought up ” children. Bringing up might
take any of a number of forms: hair-pulling,
wrenching by the arm, beating with a stick, a
belt or a rag slipper. Bringing up was the only
occasion on which a grown-up devoted the whole
of his attention for the time being to a child, the
only occasion on which a child provided grown¬
ups with a mild thrill of pleasure. For instance
on summer evenings when villagers had assembled
in the grassy yards to talk things over and children
were at their wildest, the urge to bring up a child
might awaken in the bosom of a father or some
other person. On such occasions you could not
help noticing that the ensuing hiding fascinated
the other men; it was obviously one of those
matters regarding which a mutual understanding
existed between grown-ups. The other men
might even vouchsafe a friendly word or two to
the victim. After which the men would shove

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 31

tobacco into their cheeks, spit and become
sternly manlike again.

Only men, and a few women, were real grown¬
ups. The other women—hags, womenfolk—
were, to be sure, a cut above children, but a
race apart from men. In their coffee-drinking
there was a hint of the forbidden as in some of
the children’s games. They had their own secret
business unknown to their menfolk and were
properly subdued when a man flew into a rage.
The basic colour of their lives was grey, and one
element in this greyness was to be occasionally
found out by a man. It was part of a real man’s
life to take notice of his wife’s tricks now and
again, though it was not correct to be always
spying. Real manhood seemed to breathe from
that region about the waist where a man’s shirt
and his belt peeked out. Belted trousers sagging
a little in front and behind were the hall-mark
of a man. When a male had achieved these he
could chew tobacco, drink spirits, go after
women, talk bawdy, and use such words as brat
when speaking of children.

Between smock and belted trousers was the
period of combined vest and trousers, the wearer
of these being referred to as a lout or in milder
fashion as a hobbledehoy. The most solemn
event of the lout period was Confirmation Class.
Actual participation in Communion Service was
one of the weird features of the grown-up world,

MEEK HERITAGE

32

something in the same class as having a child.
As soon as a boy had been to Holy Communion,
a gulf opened between him and the world of
childhood. He quickly slid into the alarming,
mysterious and admired company of grown-ups.
Only grinning and in joking fashion would he let
fall a few vague hints when those still on the other
side of the gulf questioned him about the most
secret adult matters.

Yet even these “ most secret ” matters were
not wholly unknown on Pig Hill. The differ¬
ences between an “ old hag ” and an “ old man ”
were duly noted, imagination came to the aid of
vague suspicions, and many games were played,
at first with much giggling, then breathlessly.
Dreadful the thought that these games might
come to the knowledge of grown-ups. As some
of the children were only just learning to talk,
these had first to be conveniently lost. Some¬
times one of these three-year-olds would run
crying home, with the result that an irate mother
might come to find out who had been teasing
her brat. That brought the game to an untimely
end, and it might be nearly evening before it
could be resumed. . . . But if no interruption
occurred, the exciting game might continue and
lead farther and farther away from the village, to
end in fears of a hiding during a belated return
home. These fears would sometimes prove to be
well-founded, at other times the truant might

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 33

find at home a genial atmosphere: father away
somewhere and mother drinking coffee with a
neighbour’s old woman. That was a pleasant
afterglow to the rich experiences of the day.

Jussi passed through the usual phases up to his
ninth year. At twenty and even thirty, memories
of those Pig Hill days would suddenly crowd into
his mind. Not until he had married did he
entirely forget them. And when he had children
of his own he never, not even by accident,
associated them with the games played on
Pig Hill.

These games came to an end when Jussi was
in his ninth year. That year many other games
played beside the thousand lakes came to an
end. People read out the figures on the backs
of their almanacks, one by one, i, 8, 8, 6. Some
there were, of course, who knew how to read
them: one thousand, eight hundred and

eighty-six.

It rained that summer, rained without cease.
After St. Jacob’s Day hardly a day when rain did
not fall on the muddy roads and sodden fields.
Old people lamented, the younger were silent,
and melancholy children gazed out of dim
window-panes, unconsciously afraid that they
would never be able to return to their playing-
fields. To go out was to face a cold wind that
drove the raindrops through one’s thin smock;

MEEK HERITAGE

34

one’s toes began to tingle with the cold and one
had to hurry back to the warmth of the home.

The anxiety in the minds and countenances of
adults was vaguely reflected in the children’s
minds; they missed the bright harvest and
sowing days. The older children were instinc¬
tively quieter as they saw the men bring in,
between showers, the germinating grain and
potatoes dug out of a morass of mud, or work,
up to their knees in clay, at a hopeless autumn
sowing. For Jussi Nikkila—and for Maija—
there were two happy days that summer, when
Penjami went off to Tampere. The rye reaped
at Nikkila was no good for sowing, and so with
what could be squeezed from the cows he went
to town to buy seed. On his return Penjami had
a little seed grain with him, but not enough. He
also brought with him his first bottled spirits
and had contracted his first debts at the seed-
merchant’s. Of the small stock of seed Maija
succeeded in stealing part, which she gave to the
ragman in exchange for coffee. This time
Penjami noticed the theft and a quarrel ensued
that lasted two days and blazed up every now
and then into sheer fighting.

Autumn and winter swooped down early on the
sown fields, sdll only half-protected by snow. At
Nikkila most of the land had to be left unsown,
and before Christmas bread was being baked
from flour that was more than half chaff. After

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 35

All Saints Day the only males left on the farm
were Penjami and Jussi. The farm-work was
left to depend on the two crofters.

In the midst of well-timbered forests these
people—the term " Finnish nation ” meant
nothing to them—struggled on from week to
week and month to month, beset by a mounting
tide of misfortunes. There came a June when a
Harjakangas farmer going out into his yard at
three o’clock in the morning would see in the soft
reflected light of the clouds snow on the slopes
of Pig Hill, gleaming white ice on the lake, and
tangled yellow sprouts in the rye-fields. Mid¬
summer and the following weeks were in their
sudden bewildering glory like the premature
attempts of a sick man to rise from his bed, a
turn that boded no good. Then came the first
days of September, brightly smiling mornings
that seemed to say in answer to the distraught
look in men’s eyes, ‘ Why this amaze? Can you
not see that these are festival days? A new era
is dawning.’

As though to celebrate the event nature
furnished three such rime-adorned mornings in
succession, although one would have been ample.
People trod the narrow lanes looking strangely
shrunken. Among them was Penjami Nikkila
quite sober and comically solemn. He saw men
working in Husari’s field at a task that at any
other time would have provoked ribald remarks

MEEK HERITAGE

36

from him; they were cutting the sparse rye with
scythes and raking up the cut stalks into little
bundles of straw. As it was, Penjami passed
staidly by and with unfeigned gravity said good¬
morning in a voice not far removed from tears.

After long preparations, like muttered remarks
from afar, and taking care the whole time to
leave a little room for hope, the dread visitor had
come at last and relieved its victims of their
torturing burden of hopes. In Harjakangas
village Pa Ollila was the only man who harvested
a small crop of rye. He did not, however, dwell
much on this good fortune, but spoke all the
louder as he went about saying, “ It’s real hard
lines to think that it’ll be spring before pine-bark
will be fit to eat.”

Dusk gathers on the last Christmas Eve the
Nikkila family is to celebrate together. Some¬
how there is work to be done even in times like
these; even on Christmas Eve odd tasks keep the
family occupied to nightfall, so that no one has
time to let their thoughts dwell at any length
on Christmas until darkness forces them to go
indoors. Moreover, on this occasion toilers in¬
stinctively take special care to keep their thoughts
from dwelling overmuch on Christmas. They
are for once in no haste to come together in a
Yuletide spirit of peace. And yet in the depths
of their souls these outwardly rough ignorant

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 37

beings have inherited through long contact with
a melancholy and mysterious nature a secret
sensibility; many fancy even now that they hear
in the air the beat of the wings of the Christmas
angel of their childhood’s days. And at that
sound the footsteps of a solitary toiler tend to
falter and his mind surrenders to the reality of
the present: a famine-year Christmas. He tries
to linger on out of doors. . . .For others, too, will
of course have heard the Christmas angel, and
in its passage there seemed to be a dire foreboding
that he is loth to let others read in his glance.

Somehow, miraculously, on this of all years,
time in its course has led to this evening, Christ¬
mas Eve. Frost has not held up the passage of
time.

In the twilight old Penjami sits beside the
window in the living-room. He is tired and
stares dully into the yard; at the moment he
would be unable to pluck up enough spirit for a
quarrel. Dread thoughts do not throng his
mind, nor has he heard any Christmas angel.
He finds it easy to sit idle in the empty room;
the prevailing note of his mood is a spiteful
boredom.

Christmas—old Penjami has seen many Christ¬
mases, grand ones. The Christmas spirit has
coursed richly in his veins, swollen by a satiety
of spirits, ale and pork. At such Christmases a
man felt himself master in his own house. His

MEEK HERITAGE

38

womenfolk and brats were sure scared to death
when he set off yelling to the home of his neigh¬
bour Husari, that time he was having the law
on Husari. They fought to begin with, then
swapped horses, and at last slept side by side in
Husari’s bakery chamber. But it wasn’t a long
sleep, for early in the morning they drove
together to church behind rattling sleigh-bells. . ..
There was breadth and depth and height in
Christmas in those days. And afterwards came
St. Stephen’s Night and many others right to
Twelfth Night. Wild Christmases—the old hags
were younger then.

In the dusk of a famine-year Christmas old
Penjami dully recalls memories of the good old
times. He seems to himself to be alone in the
world; for the beings who now fuss about here
he feels only a splenetic distaste. They exist
merely to witness his degradation, to see him
become almost as they are. The cupper-woman
still lives, but she is old, and when hags grow old
they are as nothing.

Penjami knows one man who does not lack
drink even at this time. Penjami lets his thoughts
dwell on Pa Ollila. An older man than he, yet
somehow not of his world, even if he is not of
the world of those others either. A man aggra-
vatingly apart, immeasurably above Penjami and
those others in every way. Penjami knows for
certain that Pa Ollila has drunk as much spirits

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 39

as he has, yet the man is in better health, and
richer. Eats mostly bread baked entirely of
flour; the frost did not take all his rye, and three
full loads came for him from his home parish of
Kokemaki. And to crown all, Penjami owes him
money, six hundred roubles. . . . And it’s no use
starting anything with him on Christmas Eve.

Penjami got up from the bench and padded
into the yard, with no clear idea of where he was
going. He saw Jussi shivering with cold on the
hill-side and was about to bawl at him when a
motley company came into view from behind the
bath-house, drawing a big sledge. A familiar
scene at this time, one that gives a fillip to Pen¬
jami’s thoughts, for the sight of the newcomers
makes him realize that compared with them he
is after all a landowner, a master.

“ A peaceful Christmas,” the beggars wish
him in a North Finland dialect.

“ We want no Northmen’s peace here,” Pen¬
jami replies. “ Pack off with you to Oravainen,
the clinic’s there. Do you hear, you’re not
coming inside when I say no.”

Penjami set off towards Ollila, leaving little
Jussi to watch the beggars—or Northmen—
retreat. The starving in one’s own parish are
not called beggars; but as much as fifty years
later, during the war, the Juha Toivola that
Jussi had meanwhile become still thought of
Northmen as aliens of a horrible kind whenever

MEEK HERITAGE

40

he heard the word mentioned; the atmosphere
of this particular Christmas was strongly lodged
in his mind.

As soon as Penjami was at a safe distance, Jussi
set off at a trot to the little cabin on Pig Hill.
Some instinct drew him away from home even
at that late hour; it was as if he expected to find
the real Christmas on Pig Hill, one that would
certainly not come to Nikkila. Ah, if he could
spend this evening with the Pig Hill boys! At
home Jussi has no companions.

At Pig Hill the arrival of Jussi caused surprise;
the mother, Kustaava, took it for a sign that
Penjami was in a bad temper. Tactful inquiries,
however, revealed that there had been no quarrel.
Penjami had gone out somewhere and Jussi had
crept here . . . well, in a way it was easy to
understand. Turnip-stew lent a flavour of
Christmas to the room, but Jussi guessed rightly
that he was not to share in it. A shadow fell
over his mood; he slipped noiselessly from the
room, enigmatical as a Christmas omen. And
after this instinctively undertaken excursion there
was nothing left to do but go home, away from
under the emerging stars. Indoors a torch
burned as on other nights. The family was
waiting for the master before proceeding to the
bath-house. But as the bath-house was cooling,
the common steam-bath had to be taken without
him.

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 41

The Nikkila family behaved peculiarly on that
evening in other ways as well. Pa Ollila had
already let the Christmas peace steal over him;
he had bathed and was brushing his beard when
Penjami intruded his company on him. Was
this the proper time to talk about debts? And
it was too early yet for drinks in honour of
Christmas; the right time to begin the row of
those was at the supper table with the whole
farm-folk assembled, after a hymn had been
sung. Pa nearly lost his temper.

“You know the sum as well as I do, of course
you do. It’s six hundred roubles and you’ve
paid no interest at all this two years. That’ll go
on to the loan. . . .

“You know well enough I don’t sell spirits,
not for money or on credit. But I’ll have the
interest added to the loan, as you say. That’ll
be near enough another two hundred marks. . . .

“ For that matter I don’t mind giving you a
drop of spirits for nothing, enough for you to get
the feel of Christmas. Got a can or anything
with you ? . . .

“ And don’t go bearing a grudge against me if
I have to distrain on you for my lawful rights.
It’ll be two thousand six hundred marks. God’s
peace.”

After the bath there was some anxiety in the
Nikkila living-room. What would the old man
say at their going to the bath-house without

MEEK HERITAGE

42

waiting for him? Maija was still in the bath¬
house; she had gone there after the others,
having lingered behind to bring in secretly the
customary layer of straw for the living-room
floor. A poor show the straw made; it was part
of a lot plucked that morning for cattle-feed from
the thatched roof of a barn and was a couple of
years old. Jussi dutifully sat down among the
straw, which gave forth a close mouldy smell.
He felt lonely with only grown-ups around him.
A spirit of anxiety had settled on the room.

Old Penjami’s footsteps were recognized while
he was still in the porch. His familiar eye
gleamed from the doorway with an unusual
brightness, his breath came louder than usual,
and those in the living-room noticed at once the
fair-sized flagon under his arm, which he carried
brazenly enough. It was not a vessel belonging
to the farm; he must have got it somewhere in
the village.

To everybody’s surprise Penjami did not start
quarrelling at once. All were silent; Jussi had
crept away from the straw. Penjami took the
flagon to his own cupboard, slowly drawing the
door open and as slowly closing it, after which,
without a word, he went out. He staggered as
he walked; on special occasions like this one
saw clearly how much Penjami had aged during
these difficult years. Hardly worth while being
afraid of any longer. The women gave a short

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 43

laugh when he was clear of the living-room.
Nevertheless, there was enough life left yet in the
old screech-owl for him to cast a damper even
over this dismal Christmas.

If Penjami had gone out as mysteriously in
similar circumstances three years earlier, there
would have been good cause for Aapeli to go
after him to see that the mistress came to no
harm in the bath-house. But now, Aapeli had
left and those in the living-room knew that
Maija could not be in any serious danger. Life
in all its forms is at a low ebb at Nikkila.

One faint attempt at a revival of former days
did occur before the meal. Penjami had started
to take a steam-bath and had half undressed
himself, but then wearied of the whole business.
The mistress left him there and returned to the
house, and she had had time to lay the table and
bring out from one of her own hiding-places the
single tallow dip she had been saving, when
Penjami, in shirt-sleeves and barefooted,
stumbled into the house and staggered to his
cupboard. After three great gulps from the
flagon he sank down into a sitting position on his
bed, in his brain a dull content that he had the
spirits, anyway, even though this was to be his
last Christmas in this bitter life and even if he was
deeper in debt than he could exactly say. His
spent forces revived to half-cock. He caught
sight of the boy, whom he could never resist

MEEK HERITAGE

44

tormenting. The lad, however, is too small
game for Penjami just now, with all the family-
present. His glance falls on the straw.

“Who’s been bringing cattle-feed into the
house, eh? ”

“ A lot of difference it makes whether that kind
of cattle-feed’s here or there,” said Maija.

“ I’ll teach you what difference it makes—
hags, cows!” roared Penjami and staggered to
the table intending first of all to upset the candle.
Maija moved the candle out of his reach, where¬
upon Penjami sank down on to the floor, suc¬
ceeded in gathering an armful of straw and tried
to carry it out of the house.

“ Stop fooling about, you poor body.” Maija
tried to stop him.

“ I’ll show those Ollila beggars what we do
with our cattle-feed! ” Penjami quavered. But
in the ensuing struggle he fell down and hurt his
hip. He was unable to get up unaided, and
growling he submitted at last to being helped up
by Maija.

Safely in bed he gasped, “ Give me a drink! ”
And when Maija paid no attention, helpless as he
was, he roared in a loud voice, “ Give me a drink!”

Maija looked inquiringly at Marke.

“ There’s some in his cupboard,” said Marke
carelessly.

Old Penjami Nikkila sleeps and the family sit

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 45

down to their Christmas Eve fare: coarse chaff-
cake, watery sour milk, mutton, turnip stew.
The solitary dip casts a yellowish light on the
lean faces round the table. The frost crackles,
bringing a greeting from many other homes
where other families are at this moment eating
with similar feelings. Men and women with
solemn eyes; thin-necked children chewing with
difficulty as though each morsel swallowed was
accompanied by unseen tears.

The lofty heavens with their stars look down
on this phase in the history of a lowly people,
watching the efforts it is making to keep alive
the flickering flame of life for coming, unforeseen
fates, for times happier and times more desperate
even than these, two, five decades, centuries
ahead. The heavens see immense forests where
gold in millions slumbers beside a dying beggar
and a flame-eyed lynx. In the clearings the
heavens see grey villages, where here a man
dreams sated dreams of the farms soon to fall
into his hands, there another lies asleep in the
knowledge that this is the last Christmas he will
ever sleep in his inherited home, and where in
packed refuges for vagrants, the clinics, those
branches of the nation to which no part has
been assigned in coming events slowly dis¬
integrate. So varied are the sights the heavens
see huddled together in one common grey
harmony; the time of sharpest discord is not

MEEK HERITAGE

46

yet. But in the substance of earth and heaven
forces are already at work, invisible and secret.
Christmas Eve in 1867. At this distance the
period begins to look extremely interesting, but
to those living then it was a drab time. After
the meal Maija tried to strike up a hymn, but
she began on too low a note and the others were
unable to join in. She gave up after a couple of
verses.

Jussi’s mood was composed of the vague
impressions left by his experiences of the day.
The childish visit to Pig Hill grew to the dimen¬
sions of a Christmas adventure, the smell of
turnip stew symbolized a Christmas feast, father’s
vagaries served to revive old memories, and after
the meal he sat down again on the mouldy
straw. Sleep came at last to round off the faint
illusions awakened by this tiny chain of
incidents.

Penjami had always driven beggars away from
the house. But this Christmas the first batch
of vagrants to arrive succeeded in gaining a foot¬
hold of a kind at Nikkila. The family had
hardly lain down to sleep when an old woman
wormed her way into the living-room with two
children whose mother she declared had died on
the road. As old Penjami failed to wake up,
they were allowed to spend the night on the
musty straw. Their arrival woke Jussi to a semi¬
conscious state, enough for the picture of these

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 47

tramps to impress itself on his naked sleep-
fogged soul. He had a feeling that the real
Christmas had made headway while he had been
asleep.

In the morning Penjami was bad-tempered,
but physically so weak that he was incapable of
creating any serious disturbance. He quarrelled
vaguely with the beggars. The old woman
stuck up for herself and mothered the two
children, wringing almost by main force a drop
of milk for them from the scanty stock in the
house. She stopped over the next night, ate the
Nikkila chaff-bread with relish, appraising its
good points, spoke with much inside knowledge
of the general state of the country and of the
railway works about to be begun at Riihimaki,
rattled off the names of the various refuges as
matters familiar to everybody, gave advice about
baking and in short behaved in every way as a
person of superior knowledge. A queer moist
beggary smell exuded from her clothes, mingling
with the age-old smell of tobacco and earth that
was the natural atmosphere of the Nikkila living-
room. On Boxing Day she went off with her
rags and the two children in the direction of
Tampere.

The last phase had begun for the Nikkila
household. Thereafter beggars came often and
were not driven away. No sooner had they dis-

MEEK HERITAGE

48

covered that there was little food in the house
than they behaved much as the old woman had
done at Christmas; dropped their unav ailin g
prayers and made themselves at home for a day
or two. One beggar had a pocketful of beans,
and these were cooked and eaten at Nikkila.
Penjami tried to be fierce, but in the end ate his
own share of them.

The customary discipline of the family re¬
laxed, becoming as it were dissolved in the smell
of the beggars, which was already a permanent
feature of the house. Jussi saw boys of his own
age in abundance; a dim idea of a greater world
and of its spirit awoke in his consciousness; that
queer smell seemed to be enticing him some¬
where. He could roam round the house and
yards at his will; nobody took any notice of him.
He saw death at close quarters. And before long
Jussi began to want to follow the beggars. It was
as though he divined that he would soon be
leaving, but when?

For old Penjami the days were full of secret
misgivings and self-torment. He had finished
the spirits and was ashamed to go to Pa Ollila a
second time. Why ashamed? He could not
have said. Since Christmas Penjami had felt an
alarming loss of bodily strength, and because of
this, all kinds of unhappy thoughts had begun to
oppress him, especially when he was alone. In

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 49

solitary moments he seemed to hear an invisible
parson holding forth in stern accents. From
dealing with the days of Penjami’s youth the
preacher went on to incidents during his long rule
of the farm and wound up by describing the
causes and nature of these years of adversity.
The preaching voice became low and gentle as
it spoke of matters unintelligible to Penjami. On
one subject it said nothing, but all of a sudden
the purpose and meaning of the sermon became
clear in a single illuminating flash: it was just
because of that one unsaid thing the invisible
parson was preaching specifically to him—he was
dying, he would not see the times change, for he
himself was incapable of change. Would he
join the lost in Hell? He had never thought of
such matters, but descriptions of Heaven had
always seemed sickly sweet to him. Whenever
he had let his thoughts stray in that direction,
the mind-picture evoked was that of himself on a
death-bed, confessing his sins in a thin effeminate
voice. The most sickening situation a tobacco-
chewing brandy-smelling man could find himself
in.

The only form this side of Penjami’s life had
ever taken was that he drove to church with the
rest and when in good humour made the same
jesting remarks about church matters as about
other things. If the parson preached like a man,
one could listen to him. But everything that

E

50 MEEK HERITAGE

had to do with salvation was in the same class as
brats, which you had to put up with in this
world, so endlessly trying as they were to a man
of spirit.

But now, an invisible parson preached at
Penjami and wanted him to turn himself into a
brat. He is about to die, he is in debt, softened
in every way, this very minute a beggar pants on
the bench beside the fireplace. The bailiffs will
soon be in the house, he can feel that. If real
men were to see him now, in this state of mind,
they would teasingly take him by the scruff of
the neck and shake him, as you shake a brat.
Impossible to picture Pa Ollila, that whisker-
fringed old fellow, getting into a state like
this; all he does is talk his grating Kokemaki
dialect.

Suddenly a violent fit of shivering shook
Penjami’s body; his brains were sticky with his
recent thoughts. He was scared, his lips and
hands began to tremble, he was going to be ill.
His mind acted automatically; he fetched Pa
Ollila’s empty flagon from the cupboard and
instinctively he thrust the deeds of the farm into
his bosom. Then, shivering, he hurried out.

Jussi sees him go and knows that soon some¬
thing will happen. He is prepared in advance.
He gazes in excitement at the Northerner panting
on the bench and casts a glance every now and
again out of the window to see whether there

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 51

are more beggars about. There’s one coming
now. . . .

But there comes Penjami, too, the flagon under
one arm and five stout loaves under the other.
Ollila has never yet sent a hot loaf to Nikkila
from any of his bakings; he seems to be making
up for it now. Again Penjami’s glowing appari¬
tion fills the doorway, and the newly arrived
beggars look longingly at the bread in the belief
that it is intended for distribution. But Penjami
takes his loaves and the flagon to the cupboard.
Costly articles, though this time he had got them
remarkably easily; he hadn’t even needed to
ask for them. But now the farm deeds are at
Ollila. To Penjami it is as though a crushing
weight had been removed from him; his shiver¬
ing has given way to a pleasant heat. Now for a
lie down in bed.

“ Isn’t the master going to give a fellow-pauper
anything, seeing he’s been helped?” asked the
Northerner who had been in the house since
yesterday.

Penjami, who had not noticed the beggars, is
now reminded of them.

“ I’ll show you fellow-pauper! ”

He staggered to his feet and looked around him
for a weapon. Fever, drink and the feeling of
liberation brought on by a desperate decision
have aroused the old spirit in him. His heart
glows: drink in the cupboard and an opportunity

MEEK HERITAGE

52

to clear the house and then lie down in peace.
The house and the fields, gone, by God! gone
the foundations of life. He sees Jussi among the
beggars and in a flash in one quarter of his
consciousness he sees all that part of his life to
which Maija belongs; it flickers past him as one
long aggravating and revolting mess.

But at the decisive moment the tinkle of many
bells comes from outside; the end of a sleigh, a
bearskin rug and a stout dark-complexioned man
come into view. The Sheriff has come. The
beggars are startled, and Pcnjami forgets the
great devouring desire of his heart. 'The augur
he has snatched up dangles forgotten in his
hand.

The Sheriff grasped the situation without
having to ask; in one minute he had bawled out
the beggars. An electric silence and a familiar
smell are all that is left of them. Penjami’s ears
sing. His liberation is proceeding with giant
strides: the Sheriff already in the house. Pcn¬
jami felt exhausted; quite a festival day this.
His rising fever and the dark-skinned Sheriff
seem to belong together, to this irreparable thing
that is happening. The backbone of the winter
is already broken; the evening sun shines on
bluish snowdrifts in which there is a hint of spring.
And not a single beggar in sight.

All Penjami could say to the Sheriff was:
“ Yes—reckon that’s so—two weeks from now at

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 53

the latest—all right. I’ll try. Not feeling quite
well. ...”

In some fashion matters progressed so far that
the Sheriff got a drink.

“The old hags might have a drop of coffee. . .

“ Don’t want any, I’m in a hurry.”

The sleigh runners squeak; bells tinkle. Pen-
jami was left alone in the tempered silence of
his inherited home. Now he really was alone.
Sudden and agitating experiences had aroused in
him a state of mind that was the first and last of
its kind in the whole of his life. There was not a
grain of spite in him against anything or anybody.
His tobacco-stained bristly jaw quivered; he
wept, the last of a centuries-long chain of land-
owners.

His recent visit to Ollila was his last outing in
the Harjakangas lanes.

That same night he died. His last words
were: “I’m not dying as a dog of a farmer
dies.” He was clearly raving at the time, for
he uttered these, the last words of a local gentle¬
man which he used to imitate when in his cups,
in a gentie, almost blissful voice.

Little Jussi’s dream came true soon after
Penjami’s death. The farm was sold at the
county offices in Turku for arrears of taxes. Pa
Ollila, the biggest creditor, made the highest
bid; he put in his youngest son Anttoo as master.

MEEK HERITAGE

54

Maija had to leave the bare-stripped house,
taking her son with her. She did not elect to
stay on in her birthplace, where her little life
ever since her childhood’s days had been so full
of disappointments, but after drying her tears
decided to try her luck with her brother, who was
rumoured to be in fairly easy circumstances.

One bright morning Jussi awoke to find his
mother carrying odds and ends of property to a
sleigh outside the door. Maija had somehow
managed to obtain a few coffee beans, and of the
loaves brought home by Penjami from Ollila a
few crusts were miraculously left. They break¬
fasted on these and stowed away the rest. Then
they set off, and the house lay behind them.

Maija drew the sledge and Jussi pushed at the
uprights, dressed in his one-piece vest and
trousers and one of Penjami’s coats; Maija wore
the other. A springlike sun shone brightly on
dazzling snow. When Jussi secretly glanced
behind him he saw the beautiful brow of Pig
Hill where he had played so many richly satisfy¬
ing games. He swallowed hard once, and the
charm of a vagrant’s life slowly turned to
melancholy.

The first part of the journey they were alone,
and Jussi kept on calling to mind all the people
he could remember from the first ten years of his
life,, people who had latterly scattered and
vanished. He remembered Aapeli and Kustaa,

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 55

Eeva and Marke and father, Penjami. From
this distance and these strange surroundings they
all looked queerly alike.

Soon, however, Jussi and Maija had travelling
company. When they came to the main road
they saw, wherever the land lay open, long
unbroken lines of tramps. Most were on foot
and hauled piled-up sledges, but one saw occa¬
sionally an emaciated horse. A sledge or horse-
sleigh invariably formed the nucleus of a little
group, and those groups usually kept well
together, so that even where the crowd was
thickest there was always a gap of a few yards
between the groups.

The unwonted sensation of being on a journey
awakened a growing excitement that caused even
the dragging sense of fatigue to vanish. Towards
evening this excitement further increased. The
winding, fenced-in road led again over open
ground; in the distance a red kilometre-post was
visible and at its foot something black that each
passer-by stopped to look at. It was a dead
man; beside him stood a bewildered-looking
girl in a grown-up woman’s clothes.

From the group in front of Maija and Jussi
someone said to the girl, “ Come on to the
village, or the wolves will get you in the night.”

But the girl only stood beside the dead man and
stared vacantly ahead of her.

At dusk they came to a biggish village where the

MEEK HERITAGE

56

little army of vagrants scattered into the different
houses. Maija and Jussi went into a dark porch
and tried to open the door. But it was fastened
on the inside; there was baking going on in the
house, for they could distinctly hear the swish of
the dough. After they had rattled the door for
some time a woman opened it slightly ajar and
told them where the clinic was. Tramping the
dark lanes of the village they found the building
at last, a big draughty cabin, a nest of noisy
misery.

They were almost unconscious with fatigue,
and Jussi could not understand a single word of a
quarrel that was going on between some women.
Maija finally found out what it was all about.
One of the women was roasting coffee beside the
fire. She had been out to get the beans from a
ragman in exchange for a few rags which she had
pulled off the body of an old woman who had
died just at the moment when the other woman,
watching beside the death-bed with similar
intentions, had popped out into the yard for a
minute. The disappointed claimant now de¬
clared that the clothes had been taken off while
the old woman was still alive; she had seen her
move her jaws even after she had been carried
out into the wood-shed. Hence the squabble.
It looked, however, as though the disappointed
woman might soon have a chance to compensate
herself for her disappointment; a badly swollen

birth and childhood 57

man at the rear of the room was obviously at his

last gasp. , . r ,

Here Maija and Jussi spent their first night.

In the morning, still in the grip of the same
excitement, they continued their journey, and
late at night reached their destination. ter

drinking a little water they fell asleep. And the
next day Maija actually succeeded in arranging
matters so that Jussi could stay on at Tuonla,
while she went on to look for suitable work.

It was May already and a beautiful promising
soring when Maija was next seen at Tuonla.
She arrived in the evening, too weak to give any
description of her wanderings. During the night
her condition grew worse; she groaned so loudly
that she woke up the family. Her son was
awakened that he might see her end.

So ended Jussi’s childhood.

II

THE POOR RELATION

As a bright sun rises after a frosty night, so the
spring of 1868 broke early and beautiful over the
death that had raged and was still raging. Or,
rage is not the word, for none heard its voice.
Among the small groups it would leave now and
again a wasted man in the fold of a snowdrift
beside a fence and lessen the cares of a woman in
some backwoods hut already bereft of her
husband by taking her last fragile child. Even
where as many as twelve thousand members of
the struggling host were assembled in joint
affliction, misery did not, so far as is known, give
rise to any disturbances.

Along the sandy slope of the Salpausselka
watershed a multitude of this kind worked on a
main artery that was to lead east to that great
human nest St. Petersburg. While some dug,
others stood behind them waiting for the moment
when Death would surrender a spade into new
hands. And Death strove to be impartial; it
allowed thousands to take their turns at the
spades and drop them again, and the keen¬
eyed valuers experienced an agreeable surprise:
that iron artery, in spite of the hard times,

58

THE POOR RELATION 59

cost half a million less than they had esti¬
mated.

Death worked silently then, and the thousands
lying in their sandy graves must surely have
wondered, when exactly fifty years later they
heard in the throbbing of that same iron artery
the words “ the cup of suffering is full to the
brim ”—and remarked, “ What, only now? It
was pretty full in our days.”

The new roseate spring shone also on the former
little Jussi Nikkila in his new abode. Once he
had been accepted into the family he need no
longer go hungry. During the whole duration
of the famine the bread at Tuorila never con¬
tained more than a third part of alien ingredients,
and that only on two occasions in the worst
winter. The master of Tuorila, it should be
explained, had been entrusted with the distribu¬
tion of public relief contributions in the locality,
and when accusing rumours began to be rife,
that little face-saving trick of mixing bark with
his flour became essential. But there was never
any lack of pure bread at Tuorila, and always
plenty of dairy produce.

Tuorila was in every respect unlike Nikkila,
and it was hard to believe that the master Kalle
was Maija’s brother. Kalle was a big, hook¬
nosed, masterful man who looked on his slovenly
sister Maija with aversion. Even Jussi could see

MEEK HERITAGE

6 o

that on the two occasions on which he was
present at a meeting between brother and sister.
Mother was downright servile towards uncle;
she left the farm without hesitation on the second
day, only too pleased that the boy was to remain.
And when, a couple of months later, she turned
up again, she did it with an air of pointing out
that she had merely dropped in at a place where
she was known for the purpose of dying. And
certainly, the brother’s heart felt lighter at this
speedy end to Maija.

Jussi was for long in a state of mild confusion.
The farmhouse rooms were spacious and neat,
and there were many rooms he was never per¬
mitted to see. There was plenty of wholesome
food, but coffee, which he had been used to
drinking several times a day, was denied him
here, though not because there was none. In
consequence, his wasted body rapidly gained in
strength, but his brain was always as though it
had gone to sleep; a queer unpleasantly healthy
stupor weighed heavily on his whole being. His
eyes tended to stare vacantly, and often he was
quite innocendy unaware that he had just been
ordered to do something or other. And when he
had to start off on some errand, he was soon
fighting to keep back his tears; the place was so
strange to him and no one ever explained any¬
thing; he was merely given orders. Afraid to
ask, he would sometimes stand in the yard until

THE POOR RELATION 6l

the mistress grew sick of waiting and came
briskly out to see “ how long he was going to be
fetching that milk-pail.” Jussi would so willingly
have run to fetch it, if he had only known where
to find it or had understood the mistress’s order.
From those days onward the reputation clung to
him that he was a clumsy dolt and rather slow-
witted.

Instinct told him what any onlooker could see,
that not a single attitude or step of his fitted in
harmoniously with his surroundings as he moved
about awkwardly in the big bakery at Tuorila,
ostensibly helping the mistress. Everything here
was so entirely different from what things had
been like at Nikkila. The master—mother had
spoken of him as Jussi’s uncle, but Jussi never got
beyond calling him master—there was no under¬
standing him at all. Always somewhere about
the farm, always solemn-looking, never drunk,
and never even for a wonder yelling at the
mistress, let alone striking her. The mistress
was not in the least afraid of the master. A
strange baffling sense of balance and harmony
existed between the two; you could not side
with either against the other. When evening
came there was no question of running about
anywhere outside of the family circle. With
the farm-hands and maids Jussi had very little
to do. They slept in their own living-room, he
slept in the bakery, and the master and mistress

MEEK HERITAGE

62

in an inside room. At night, always at the same
hour, he had to go to his neat unfriendly bed to
continue there the discomfort of the day. His
growing muscles felt the need for exercise even
when he was most torpid, and a sticky repletion
added to his sense of enslavement.

Beggars came to Tuorila, but they were a
different lot from those who used to drop in at
Nikkila. They stood humbly in the doorway
or sat in the living-room answering the mistress’s
questions in a tearful voice. Once the mistress
asked a woman her name, and when the woman
happened to have the same name as hers, she
was given alms. That same day another woman
came and volunteered the information that her
name was Emma. The mistress laughed and
gave her something too, but told her to tell all
the other Emmas that that trick wouldn’t work
any more.

Jussi was queerly shy of the beggars who came
here; not for anything would he have dared to
approach them. This was because he was now
one of the well-fed. Later, old acquaintances
began to turn up among the beggars, among them
the biggest of the children from the cabin on
Pig Hill. The sight of them aroused a feeling of
shame in Jussi, and the conversation was forced
on both sides. They told Jussi without being
asked that the Ollila folk now lorded it at Nikkila
and that the cupper-woman was ill. But this

THE POOR RELATION 63

news only penetrated an outer layer of Jussi’s
mind, and then but vaguely. And when the
children left Jussi was relieved to see them go.

Summer came; grass covered the ground and
the trees were in leaf. Copper cow-bells clanked
in distant pasturages and spring sowings were
carried out in fair weather with seed supplied by
the Government. Benumbed minds awoke to
life and began to feel the need for new thoughts.
The man walking behind a harrow pondered
closely on the years of terror just past the better
to appreciate the sunny days and sprouting corn
of the present. And although still unable fully
to grasp the depth of the trials endured, the man
already drew an instinctive pleasure from a feel¬
ing that the beginning new era would soon lay
bare a kind of missing principle that was to give
life a new direction and new breadth. And
when, halting at the end of a furrow, he saw on
the road those unhappy tramps, he was vaguely
annoyed that the old era should thus still cast a
shadow over the birth of the new.

For the former Jussi Nikkila, now known as
Jussi Tuorila, this and the following summers
were the strangest period of his youth, for he was
more alone than at any other time of his life.

The lands where he roamed with the Tuorila
cattle were rich in variety of scenery; they were
slopes once cultivated by the ancient method of
firing. Dense woods of leaf-trees gave the land

64 MEEK HERITAGE

its character, but hidden away in these were
meadows complete with fences and hay-barns.
At the bottom of a continuous cleft between
mighty banks a tiny brook meandered along its
own private course. Up above, along the rims
of the banks, birches drooped fathom-long
festoons of leaves over hot-smelling ant-heaps as
the mid-day sun shone along the cleft and the
cattle lay at their noon-tide rest. Here, once he
had become familiar with the lie of the land, it
' was pleasant for Jussi to peel twigs for whisks
and cut striped walking-sticks. Here there was
none of that burden of ignorance that still made
life in the house unpleasant. Nor was there
anyone at his back to order him about; here he
could tend the cattle as he thought best.

His thoughts during the day usually took the
direction given them by whatever had chanced
to happen in the morning or the preceding
evening. Sometimes his mind would be engaged
the whole day with the present, with the scene
around him and the cattle, weaving visions of the
future, mostly with Tuorila, its master, mistress
and other elements for background. life was
good here; he would never leave the place.
Father and mother and all of past and gone
Nikkila were far away and alien to this place;
happily, they had been swept away somewhere.
This sunshine was not for them. Viewing the
matter from this sunny bank it seemed perfectly

THE POOR RELATION 65

natural that the master and mistress never
quarrelled. . . . Evening draws nigh. Pleasant
to return home with the herd.

But sometimes the evening and morning had
again been harder to bear, and the next day stern
clouds filled the sky. After dinner a flash of
lightning struck down quite close, sending young
Jussi terror-stricken to the shelter of the nearest
hay-barn. God has suddenly arrived in his head,
straight from the years at Harjakangas. Tuorila
is somewhere far away and altogether of no
importance; father Penjami has found runaway
Jussi and sits in his old seat of power. The
lightning flashes like the angry eye of all the dead
past, the thunder roars, and crying out aloud
Jussi casts himself in imagination into Maija’s
lap. Gone the stickiness of this place from
Jussi’s blood; in the rain the familiar landscape
has an ominously strange look. The bleak
cruelty of his father, Penjami, and the weak
gentleness of his mother are the dearest treasures
of his trembling heart on this distant alien clearing
in the hour of danger.

And even after the storm has abated, there is
no relief for Jussi to-day. Two cows are missing.
Jussi’s breath still comes in gasps after his recent
sobbing, and that makes the new outburst of
tears flow all the easier; what is going to happen
to him if the cows are lost? The bell-cow
comes into sight near the edge of the clearing,

F

MEEK HERITAGE

66

but it has a wild look and it flees when Jussi
approaches it. Wolves! Crying and mouthing
burning prayers to God, Jussi, a big lad, sets off
running home with his heart in his mouth,
stumbling along the wet paths, believing each
moment he can hear a wolf worrying the cattle.
At twilight Jussi’s wailings were overheard by an
old fellow from a backwoods cabin, who set out
for the Tuorila pastures. He found one of the
cows stuck in a bog, and the bell-cow galloping
and rumbling around it. Grasping what had
happened and seeing that there was no immediate
danger, he returned home to fetch a rope. . . .

On those grazing lands Jussi spent several
hundred mornings, noons and evenings, and no
two of them were exactly alike. The herd-boy
of the ’seventies was incapable of consciously
noting their effect on him, which was to etch an
instinctive feeling of rootlessness ever deeper on
his mind; the past faded from his memory like a
weeks-old dream and for him there was no com¬
pelling present. He was neither farm-hand nor
son; his place was neither the living-room nor
the inside rooms, but still only the bakery.

Then came the eve of the day on which he
was to go to Confirmation Class. With a scaring
excitement mingled a pensively happy fascina¬
tion, for this was a step towards a new phase of
life. At dusk Jussi crept without asking leave

THE POOR RELATION 67

into the farm-hands’ living-room, which happened
to be still empty. He sat there humming a
grown-up tune, the coarse words of which
strangely caressed his mind. He sat on even
after the men had come back from work. The
master came in person to fetch him away, and in
his voice was an unfamiliar harshness as he said
to Jussi, “What are you doing here?” Jussi
seemed to sense in his tone a foretaste of the new
phase that was to begin on the morrow.

The bobbed-haired boys sat in the church pews
and appeared to be listening to the Rector’s
explanation of the Holy Trinity. The Rector
spoke in a slow and clear voice, in polished
theological terms wholly out of relation to the
fat-smeared boots and homespun coats of the
boys. The precise enunciation of his discourse,
its form settled during decades of repetition,
was far above the cottage sense of the boys,
though the colour and measured roll of his voice
did create a strong atmosphere of a kind to which
the mind has inherited a certain receptivity in
the course of generations. Nor were primitive
conceptions of a Father, a Son and a Holy Ghost
that looks like a bird, shaken. Weren’t they all
depicted above the many-tendrilled opening
letters of the Catechism ?

Many of the boys have at one time or another
known moments of distress when they have cried

MEEK HERITAGE

68

in burning accents the name of the Lord. That
God, too, passes down from generation to genera¬
tion, not through the mouths of teachers, but
through great trials in the dark depths of the
people’s lives. It throbs in the veins of a father
as, word having come, he hurries along a grassy
forest track to his cabin in order to be in time to
take a dying child into his arms. And when an
old grand-dad, after a week of drinking, gives his
last groan, it is that God who arrives in mysterious
expiation. Little children look gravely on and
see that God draw near to big people, and they
preserve him in their memories for coming
generations. Often the attributes of God in the
imagination are those of father: old, harsh,
respect-awakening.

That God, however, does not appear to the
collective soul of Confirmation Class boys. While
the classes last there is so much else to do:
lessons to be learned by heart from the Catechism
if one means to pass and not be singled out for
further improvement; food supplies to be taken
care of; one had to watch out lest one disgrace
oneself in that company. When the master at
one’s lodgings was away, one went out in the
evenings on mischief bent and roamed the village
lanes. If nothing better turned up there were
always other boys to shove, and from lost tempers
it was only a step to a proper fight. One evening
found Jussi sulking by himself apart from the

THE POOR RELATION 69

other boys, who were in high spirits, when
the Rector happened to pass. And of course the
Rector’s suspicions fastened on the boy who was
without playmates, though he said nothing at the
time. His disappearance was a signal for the
other boys to set upon Jussi.

“Was your father Penjami? Was your father
Penjami? ” they mocked.

And the next day, when the Rector found
Jussi out on some point of ignorance concerning
the sacraments he said:

“ Thou Johan Benjamin’s-son, how dost thou
employ thy evenings? Thou walkest the roads
and seekest not the Lord’s holy wisdom. I say
to thee: take heed of this reproof.”

The other boys watched the Rector and Jussi
with malicious delight.

Confirmation Class was for Jussi from begin¬
ning to end a period of little and big disappoint¬
ments, a period wholly lacking in that which had
been in his mind when he stood humming those
grown-up tunes on the evening before class
began. He tried, indeed, to recapture that mood
on various evenings when he happened to be
alone in the living-room at his lodgings, but with
scant success. * His young unformed mind was
at the stage when an irresistible urge drives one
to create a sentimental comprehensive idea of
the visible world. But in the foreground of his

MEEK HERITAGE

70

mind were only Tuorila and this village and, as it
were balanced on the top of these, the tangle of
sensations evoked by attendance at Confirmation
Class. His sense of being alive expanded, and
it was as though he were being compelled to
follow suit; a big space seemed to be opening
out, which he had to fill. His memories of
Nikkila with all that he had fancied about
Confirmation Class would not fit in at all; they
seemed rather to shrink when what was needed
was that they should expand. He felt uncom¬
fortable and helpless in the big living-room, from
the window of which one saw the roofs, gables
and tree-tops of the village in the growing dusk.
And common to all his present moods was a
sense of something to be done; the idea of
shirking or forgetting lost its flavour here. And
there was the added fear that he did not at all
know how to do that something that had to be
done.

The feeling of helplessness reached its climax at
the moment when he was about to partake of the
Sacrament. He knew that at that moment he
ought to be thinking of God, but God was
absent; there was only the faint fascination born
of the strangeness of the wafer and wine. The
Rector, the Pastor and all the other boys wore an
air as though there was no call for God to be
present then. The dominating atmosphere
seemed to be that this was the ceremonial

THE POOR RELATION 71

admittance of the year’s class to Holy Com¬
munion.

An atmosphere of sated rest hangs over the
prosperous village this late summer Sunday after¬
noon. To-morrow reaping is to begin at Tuorila.

The servants are all away from home, all
except Jussi, who has none of the liberties of a
servant. And yet he is a man, one of the Con¬
firmed—how much that idea seemed to hold
while the reality of it was still before him, and
how little its realization has brought! He is not
actually forbidden to do anything, orders and
reproofs are about all he ever hears, but he is
fettered by the ruling spirit of the farm. It
weighs heavier on him now than in those early
days after his arrival; especially since his Con¬
firmation has he become aware of it. Only two
weeks ago the master struck him in the hay-
field. When, half-crying, he cursed to the other
men and threatened that he would leave the farm
when the year was up, a crofter remarked:

“ Well, well, so Jussi thinks he’ll not be taking
a hiring for next year.”

“ No, Devil take me, I won’t,” sobbed Jussi.

“ It strikes me you haven’t got your hiring yet
for this year,” went on the crofter, and Jussi
sensed that they were making fun of his threats,
that there was something unusual in his position
which he had not yet fully grasped.

MEEK HERITAGE

72

This Sunday, during the still afternoon, he had
happened to find himself alone with the milk¬
maid in the living-room. The girl, an inveterate
chatterbox, talked in quite a friendly tone to
Jussi while she combed her hair, although when
others were present she would not condescend to
waste more than supercilious coarse banter on the
silly hobbledehoy. Now, moved by the kindness
in this passing intimacy, Jussi plucked up courage
to ask her questions of a more and more private
nature; for one thing he asked what the men had
meant that time in the hay field. Couldn’t he
give notice and leave, as Manta herself was
doing ?

“You know well enough you’re not going any¬
where,” Manta said, holding the comb up against
the light to see whether anything had caught in
it. “ The master took you when times were
bad, and you’ve no rights at all until you come of
age.”

“ When will I be of age then? ”

“ Ho, when other people are. When you’re
twenty-one.”

Then Confirmation Class meant nothing; one
had still to come of age. Jussi’s glance darkened.
He said to Manta:

“ Don’t you go either, Manta.”

“ Oh yes. Here’s a girl who’s not going to see
Kalle Tuorila’s Christmas spread,” answered
Manta, once more her own self, and with head

THE POOR RELATION 73

erect she went out of the room into the Sunday
freedom of the village.

Jussi was left alone in the living-room, feeling
much as he had done during his first weeks on
the farm. The pleasure of having passed Con¬
firmation Class had gone for ever; an oppressive
sense of being still only a child filled his mind;
he wanted to be back at Nikkila. Twenty-one
. . . and only sixteen. How quickly all his good
times were over.

Jussi gave a start when the master opened the
door.

“ Where’s Manta gone? ”

“ I don’t know.”

“ Very well, then you can go and tell the crofters
I shall want them here for the harvest.” The
master reeled off a list of all the cottages in the
distant crofters’ corner Jussi was to visit. “ And
mind you behave,” he added.

The spirit of Tuorila does not extend far
beyond the house. There was no trace of it on the
sandy road where Jussi was tramping as the
calm summer evening drew nigh. His feet
moved lightly, his lips sought to whistle a melody,
his mind nurtured an illusion of farm-hand free¬
dom. He would have liked to sing out loud, but
the sharp-eyed light dwelling in the pine-tops kept
him quiet. Wait until the mist begins to rise from
the swamps and the night-bird croaks. . . .

MEEK HERITAGE

74

Jussi had never had an outing as happy as this
during the whole of his time at Tuorila. The
flow of eventide impressions from the neat pine
forest further softened his liberated mood. At
any rate he was a farm-hand as good as any, a
Communicant. What did it matter if he was
unable to move elsewhere, wasn’t Tuorila one of
the best farms in the neighbourhood ? £ I sleep

in the living-room now,’ he mused; ‘ if I could
only get a cupboard of my own. . . . The master
is my uncle, mother was his sister; I am staying
with relations, I’m more than a farm-hand, I
don’t have to look for a hiring. ... A farm¬
hand’s got to go if he isn’t wanted. A good •
thing I can sleep in the living-room, and I’ll
have that cupboard yet, this is how I’ll get
it. . . .’

From a rocky mound he caught a sudden
glimpse of the widespread crofters’ community:
fields, fences, dwellings. To the right, against
the farthest rim of forest, a red sun, aloof and
alone, shed a waning light over the locality, the
air of which, from the hill-top, was full of happi¬
ness and freedom. Impossible that anyone down
there ever said an unkind word to anyone else,
each is free on Sunday evenings to go where he
likes, even the children. There are crofts here
that employ a farm-hand; if I could get myself
hired here. Jussi decided to linger in the place
to the last possible minute.

THE POOR RELATION 75

Rye was being cut, it seemed, at a croft called
Rouko; harvesters were working along three
plots. Every now and again a back would
straighten and a sheaf come flying over a raised
head. An old man calls for ale; some of the
harvesters are clearly drunk. ‘ What if they
start fighting? What if some one beats me?’
Jussi thought.

Jussi found most of those he was to give orders
to at the Rouko harvest-bee. He went up to
each of them a little timidly and gave his message
in the tone of one repeating a lesson learned by
heart. The eyes of one of the men glared
ominously, moisture trickled on to his beard and
his mouth took on a queer twist as he listened to
Jussi.

“ Has Kalle’s rye started to shake off the ear? ”
he asked in an aggrieved voice.

“ It’s not dropping yet, but-” Jussi answered

shyly, a litde alarmed. Nobody, however,
bothered to tease him. He went back to the road
to continue his journey to those crofts whose
tenants he had not met here.

The night is cool. A harvest-dance is on at
Rouko, and Jussi Tuorila is still there. At the
farthermost croft to which he carried his message
he was joined by one of his comrades at Confirma¬
tion Class who persuaded him to come back to

MEEK HERITAGE

76

Rouko. The cottage living-room is full of dim
bustle and ale-thickened voices; a delightful
place for a lad unexpectedly at his first dance to
enjoy from a safe corner. The living-room is
sizable; room enough for dancing and for the
violin to sound bravely. How much there is in
the world higher and bigger than the spirit that
dwells on Tuorila Farm! What would the master
and mistress of Tuorila be at this dance ? Totally
out of the picture, figures to laugh at. Whereas
Jussi, he is wonderfully at home. He has been
out into the yard several times, and no one has
teased him; he has even been asked who are to
take part in the harvesting at Tuorila. He has
been given ale, like the rest, and has tried a polka
on the floor with another boy, and means to have
another try. Nobody pays any attention to the
fact that he is all this time carrying out his
errand. A delicious night, far more delicious
than any previous night.

Yet time and again Jussi has to slip outside and
there assure himself that he has faithfully carried
out all the master’s orders to the letter. Standing
there he sees in the twilit night the hill from
which he first looked down on this spot in the
now distant afternoon. At Tuorila everybody
will be asleep; the master will not know what
time he came home and cannot scold him.
Manta is here, and he need not leave until Manta
leaves. He goes back to the house and takes his

THE POOR RELATION 77

turn at the ale-tankard. He is a man, a Com-
munion-goer, damn it all; Tuorila’s old man can
say what he likes.

Still, he wouldn’t mind leaving now, only he
can’t go all that way through the forest alone,
and Manta is still keen on dancing. It looks as
though Manta had no intention of coming with
him. Whenever he steals near to her and tries
to speak, she pretends not to hear. She sits on
men’s knees. Is she going to be somebody’s
old woman?

At midnight Jussi is on his way home along the
sandy pine-bordered track that leads back to
Tuorila. But this time he is not alone. Manta
is with him and another girl from the village and
five men. Jussi is the sixth male, but he is under
no delusion that he is a man yet. When the
men start teasing the girls and he tries to be bold
with Manta, she says to him pettishly: “ None
of your impudence. You’re too big to suck and
not big enough to lie beside a woman for any¬
thing else.” Jussi feels that his presence is an em¬
barrassment to the rest of the company; the others
tolerate him only because he understands nothing.

Yet he is not so ignorant as all that. This night
of the dance he has come much nearer to many
matters that he has often thought of while waiting
for sleep to come. He realizes that the games
played onPig Hill were sickening children’s fooling.

MEEK HERITAGE

78

They enter the village. Jussi’s heart beats
painfully; he senses that the others are in some
way against the Tuorila family. The spirit of
the farm begins to make itself felt again; it rises
and becomes menacing, while the image of the
recent dance shrinks to insignificance, retreating
as though afraid of something. And now Jussi
realises that he has tasted ale, now that its
influence is waning. If he had the choice he
would be fast asleep in his bed after a speedy
return from his errand. The coolness of the
night, want of sleep and even hunger begin to
tell on him, and the company he is in is almost
downright inimical to the whippersnapper he is.
No more dances.

But when the company makes its way to the
row of storehouses at Tuorila, Jussi is unable to
break away, not though Manta tells him in fairly
coarse language to be off. The men tumble the
girls about, and one tries to remove the ladder
leading up to the row of little attics, in one of
which Manta sleeps, with the result that it comes
down with a crash that echoes over the whole
farm. The men scatter in all directions as the
dark form of the master appears in the bakery
doorway. He dashes out towards the store¬
houses, a stout stick in his hand. Only Manta
has stood her ground; the men have escaped and
Jussi has dived under the granary. The master
calls him angrily by name, but does not deign to

THE POOR RELATION 79

search for him. Jussi hears the encounter
between master and maid.

“ My weekdays and work are yours, my
Sundays and nights are my own,” Manta says
grandly.

Jussi waited until he had heard the master go
back to the house and Manta climb to her attic
before creeping towards the house. Suddenly,
however, there was the master before him, the
stick still in his hand.

“ So that’s the way,” and with these words the
master seized Jussi by the scruff of the neck and
struck him twice on the buttocks with all his
strength. Jussi’s erstwhile companions heard his
howls with an unpleasant gripping at their
stomachs. It was not pity for Jussi; they were
abashed by their own lack of courage in not
defying the master. They meant, however, to
make a new attempt later on to reach Manta’s
attic.

Jussi clenched his teeth to keep back his sobs
as he lay in bed. A pang of shame shot through
him every time the weals left by the stick made
themselves felt. Confusedly mingled in his mind
were his childhood at Nikkila, his life at Tuorila,
the thoughts awakened by Confirmation Class,
and memories of the dance. c What is going to
happen to me in the end? ’ he wondered.

What actually happened to him next was that

MEEK HERITAGE

8 o

he was put to tying sheaves in the rye-field and
had to listen all day to mischievous hints about his
adventures of the night before. When the rye
had been harvested he was put to threshing, then
to ploughing, after that to collecting fence posts,
and so life went on. Soon the days were becom¬
ing wintry and there were twigs to be cut and
the manure to be mixed. ‘ What is going to
happen to me in the end ? ’ This fundamental
problem of Jussi’s life kept on recurring to him
each time he bruised some corner of his being on
his surroundings and sulked in silence.

The world meanwhile went on, with Tuorila
in advance of the other farms. A great gap
loomed between household life at Tuorila and at,
for instance, Nikkila. At Tuorila there were two
rows of dwellings; in one were the farm-hands’
living-room, another living-room, a kitchen and
two rooms where the old mistress and her un¬
married daughter lived; in the other row were
the bakery, the master’s and mistress’s room and
behind this rooms of growing magnificence where
parsons and other such visitors were taken.
Both the farm-hands’ room and the bakery were
now lit in the evening with oil lamps, the steady
light of which drove the ancient little familiar
spirits even from the farthest corners. Once a
pedlar spent the night on the farm, a queerly
cunning old fellow incapable even by mistake of
giving a straightforward answer. His pack con-

THE POOR RELATION 8l

tained fancy pins and printed ballad sheets.
Not a subject cropped up but he had the last
decisive word; only when the talk turned to his
own person did he become aggravatingly uncom¬
municative. The farm-hand Taavetti, who knew
as well as anybody that trickery is what keeps
the world going, tried to pull the old chap down
a peg or two by referring offhand to the St. Peters¬
burg railway, with the labour camps of which he
was only too well acquainted, and quoting one
of the foremen.

“ Ay, Vanttinen’s the man you mean,” said
the old fellow like a shot.

And with that there arose a secret competition
between Taavetti and the old pedlar, each trying
to show that he knew more of all the doings
behind the scenes than the other; in particular,
more about Vanttinen, who used to have dead
men on his pay sheet.

Through the talk shone glimpses of a wider
world. Whenever a silence happened to fall it
was as though one heard far off the murmur of
an approaching new age. The farm-hands filed
out to the bakery for supper, the seeds of a new
confidence in their minds; Taavetti seemed in
some fashion to be a bigger man than the master.
But when they came into the bakery they caught
a glimpse of the master in the adjoining room
putting down a newspaper. The name SUO-
METAR stood at the top of the sheet.

G

82

MEEK HERITAGE

A deeper man after all than the pedlar, and a
bigger man than Taavetti. Why the master will
not sell his forest, although buyers keep on turning
up at the farm, no one can understand. Even
Tavela has sold his now and got over a thousand
marks for it—over a thousand. . . . And yet
Tuorila is always abusing the crofters for wasting
his forest. Does that mean that one can get more
for forest than over a thousand ?

The master has begun to allow Jussi a little
more rope; the lad leads almost the same life
as the other farm-hands. His body grows and
becomes tougher, but his mind remains un¬
changed. He can now carry out the everyday
tasks entrusted to him without seriously bungling
them. Yet he always has an instinctive feeling
that the master does not like him. When his
first attempt at a milk-pail has to be thrown into
the fire, the master does not fly into a rage, but
merely smiles sourly. And if anyone suggests
Jussi for a task that calls for care, the master grins
faintly. The master hates in Jussi the inferior
strain in his own blood. And his present attitude
weighs heavier on Jussi’s spirits than the former
severity. He is conscious every moment that his
departure from Tuorila would be welcomed.
Only where is he to go ?

The unsympathetic attitude of his guardians
makes Jussi move with caution; he tries to keep

THE POOR RELATION 83

as much as possible in the background. Sun¬
days are the worst days, for he is not sure whether
he has the right to leave the farm, and in the
house is he too much in sight. After breakfast
is over and working boots have been duly tarred,
the other men go out into the village, leaving
Jussi alone in the Sunday silence of the living-
room, disturbed only by the visits at long in¬
tervals of a lame pauper. All he can think of
to do are infantile tests of skill intended to test
the capacities of little children, and in the
circumstances he can work up no interest in
them; he merely does them because there is
nothing else to do. The mistress comes from
her own part of the house to see whether the
living-room has been properly swept and the
sheets changed on the beds. On her departure
she absently orders Jussi to take a book and read,
speaking with her face turned away simply
because she feels that she has to say something.

By the time Christmas was near, Jussi knew
that he was not to be sent away that year at any
rate. The Christmas holidays seemed intermin¬
able. On one of the minor festival days students
from the capital give a play in the church
village. The master and mistress of Tuorila
drive there behind tinkling sleigh-bells. In their
absence Jussi breaks into song in the living-room
and tries a few polka-steps. Later in the day
he sets out boldly for a neighbouring farm,

MEEK HERITAGE

84

in his pocket a few prune kernels, which he
sucks at intervals. The neighbour’s farm-house
is small and old-fashioned, rather like old
Nikkila. The walls and ceiling of the living-
room are lined, in accordance with ancient
Christmas custom, with gleaming white shingles;
a table-cloth has been spread on the table, and
on it are a ham, a platter of bread and a tankard
of ale; hung over these is a straw baldaquin.
The master is a mild, pleasant-spoken man who
addresses Jussi as Juha and treats him as a guest.
Outside, the cheery sound of sleigh-bells rings
out now and then on the road; the mulled ale
awakens in Jussi a long-dormant sense of con¬
fidence.

Jussi was not sent away from Tuorila even
after the Christmas holidays were over, not that
spring nor when summer came. When it at
last happened autumn was nigh.

Tuorila did not sell his forest without proper
precautions as so many other farmers did in
those days. He compared the forest sold by
Tavela with his own, and had another look at
Tavela’s timber when it lay in great stacks wait¬
ing for the ice to break up. He too intended to
sell, hut he bided his time. The result was
that most forests in the vicinity had already
undergone a first cutting when he made his
bargain. The price Tuorila was able to obtain

THE POOR RELATION 85

by these tactics astonished everybody and fixed
the attention of the parish on this shrewd fellow.
One might say that that first sale of forest marked
the beginning of Kalle, or as he began to write
it, ‘ Karle,’ Tuorila’s rise as a local pillar of
society.

Another result of the sale was, in a way,
Jussi’s expulsion from Tuorila.

The master and mistress of Tuorila were feeling
at this time the urge of a personal ambition.
Since the famine years they had rapidly grown
richer, and after the sale of their forest their
means had doubled. The acquisition of wealth
is, when all’s said and done, worldly happiness
in its most tangible form, and happiness invariably
betokens a test. The question is posed : are
you man enough to stand happiness ? The
Tuorila couple found themselves drawn more
and more into the best social circles in the parish,
in which the influence of the growing Finnish
national movement was making itself felt. The
Tuorila couple were not slow to grasp the full
implications of the movement, and the per¬
spectives it opened were instinctively interpreted
by husband and wife as a rise in their social value.
In the light of the national movement even
forest prices acquired a new significance; wealth
became as it were ennobled when it could be
looked on as an accretion of power to the
movement. For the master and mistress of

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86

Tuorila the period was a time of silent suppressed
bliss.

Such feelings, however, demand an outlet;
one had only to take care that the outlet chosen
was sufficiently dignified. The matter was care¬
fully thrashed out in the course of many con¬
fidential moments between the couple, until on
the threshold of autumn they decided that they
would hold a celebration at Tuorila, to which
they would invite, besides their equals, such of
the gentry as might be expected to respond to
invitations of this kind. There were, it should be
explained, various Swedish-speaking families in
the parish with tongue-twisting names and
offended countenances who had never been
seen at any farmers 5 celebrations. Even among
the accessible were a few with Swedish sympathies,
but good-natured and company-loving enough
to accept with pleasure invitations to gatherings
where they could drink toddy and argue the
language question with supporters of Snellman
and the Finnish language.

On the day the guests were to arrive threshing
was going on at Tuorila, but after dinner Jussi
was told to stop at home and make himself pre¬
sentable, so that he would take charge of the
visitors 5 horses and look after them.

The weather was uncertain, half-cloudy. Jussi
hung about the yard waiting, oppressed again

THE POOR RELATION 87

by that feeling of discomfort and of being an
outsider which the Tuorila household had
the power of awakening in him. He was not
quite sure yet what his duties were to be; all
he knew was that his discomfort had its source
in this plan of the master’s.

The thought recurred to him that the master
was his uncle, his mother’s brother. It had
recurred to him with growing frequency all the
time the upward career of the Tuorila family
had set its stamp on the atmosphere of the
farm. It was as though the master was somehow
improperly climbing out of reach, taking care to
avoid looking Jussi in the eye, although Jussi
was his nephew. On one occason that summer
Jussi had already gone so far as to make use of
a suitable cue to refer in a casual man’s tone to
the master’s grand bargain with the forest-
buyers. The master had turned on him an
open, almost a kind stare that affected Jussi
worse than a box on the ear would have done.
And now the master had contrived this feast and
made Jussi change his clothes in the middle of the
day. The master himself prowled around, shaven
and wearing a tailed coat, on his face as he walked
past Jussi a look that seemed to say that it had
been arranged in advance that Jussi was not to
open his mouth on the subject.

The first guest to arrive was the churchwarden,
top-hatted and white-collared, and his wife.

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88

From the back seat of their cart Konanteri. a
homeless University graduate who moved from
family to family in the parish, jumped down;
he had happened to be soberer than usual and
wanting to be where drinks were to be had, had
forced himself on the churchwarden. They
were joined almost at once by the Pastor of an
outlying chapel, a black-capped surly-looking
old fellow in worn clothes; he had married his
servant-maid and was therefore not in the habit
of taking his wife with him. The next to come
was the wolf-bailiff, a farmer who had learned
Swedish and was hated and feared by the poor.
Soon most of the people whom the parish ancients
still remember and whose peculiarities they are
fond of describing were present.

Jussi took charge of the horses, put hay and
water before them as needed, examined the
vehicles, comparing them with each other and
feeling the whole time that this job of his was a
silly one and probably not at all what he ought to
have made of it. Only after dusk had fallen
and the noises from the house had gained in
loudness did he feel easier in his mind, especially
after spectators had begun to prowl round the
house. Lads from the crofters’ community
whose acquaintance he had made turned up
and with them was Kustaa Toivola, a youth
from a forest cabin some way off who had been
to Confirmation Class with Jussi. Cautiously

THE POOR RELATION 89

giggling they watched Konanteri being forcibly
led out of the main door and listened to his
sobbing as he lay beside the potato-cellar. A
little later one of the gentlemen came out and
scolded Konanteri in Swedish. Konanteri wept
and answered in Finnish that none in that
company were worthy of blacking Snellman’s
boots. Who was Snellman? The boys had
never heard of any gentleman of that name in
the parish.

Jussi had had nothing to eat since dinner;
hunger and drowsiness had been assailing him
for some time, but in this backyard company
he soon forgot his troubles. As belonging to
the household he felt himself the equal, to say
the least, of any of the other youths, and as the
evening wore on this sensation began to exercise
on him a fascination of quite a new kind. In
the excitement of the festive night he experienced
for the first time in his life, at the age of seven¬
teen, a feeling of individual independence. For
some inexplicable reason, as his companions
jostled each other around him, the idea flashed
into his mind that he was capable of looking
after himself in the world. He had been so and
so many years at Tuorila, he had had such and
such experiences; now they were feasting inside
and he had nothing in common with those making
merry inside, but plenty with these outside. A
faint malice and a strange fearlessness filled bim

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90

as he joked with the lads who had come to look
on. He was livelier and noisier than ever
before.

Meanwhile he went with Kustaa Toivola into
the living-room. There, too, their eyes sought
for opportunities for fresh mischief, but then with
a slight shock they perceived Konanteri fast
asleep in Jussi’s bed. They crept nearer to
study for once at their leisure what a gentleman
really looked like at close quarters; for Konan¬
teri was a real gentleman even if he was sometimes
off his nut; he had drunk himself out of his
schoolmaster’s job. He had had more schooling,
however, than the Sheriff; nearly as much as
the Rector. Look out, he’s opening his eyes!
The boys crept out of the living-room again
and side by side made a dash for the safety of the
yard, from where the other youths had mean¬
while vanished.

They had become friends. Kustaa Toivola’s
brown eyes gleamed under the brim of his hat,
and the coming Jussi Toivola asked him all
kinds of questions with the freedom of old
acquaintance. A road is soon going to be cut
into the Tuorila forests in readiness for the log-
haulers next winter; Kustaa means to get work
on the road. Dazzled by the spirit of liberty
that emanates from Kustaa, Jussi wanted to
hear more, but Kustaa, instinctively trying to
increase his importance in his companion’s

THE POOR RELATION gi

eyes, would say no more, but began looking
around him for a chance to play a trick on some¬
body. His glance fell on the wheels of a trap.
With a crafty look in his eyes he asked Jussi:

“ Do you know where the spanner is? ”

“ Of course I do.”

When the spanner had been found, Kustaa
proceeded to unscrew the nuts holding the
wheels to the axle. He did not remove them,
but left them loosely fast by a thread or two,
nor did he work on both wheels of any pair,
but only on one. Jussi looked on ejaculating,
“What the heck. . . .” But Kustaa took no
notice and went on with his work. And when
the last vehicle had been dealt with he threw
away the spanner and suddenly made off into
the darkness.

Jussi was on the whole dissatisfied with this
prank of Kustaa’s. He saw what it would lead
to, and he was scared and wondered whether it
wouldn’t be best to follow Kustaa’s example
and run away. Soon, however, he was searching
for the spanner, and having found it he began,
pausing every now and again to listen, hastily
tightening the nuts. He managed to give a few
turns to most of them, but at least two wheels
were still left when he had to make his escape.
The first guests to leave were already making
for their horses. He reached the living-room
unseen. Konanteri was still in his bed and he

92 MEEK HERITAGE

was forced to seek the maid’s bed behind the
chimney. Crouched down there he listened, his
heart thudding, for the inevitable outcry, as one
waits for an explosion. But time passed, and all
he heard was the ticking of the clock and Konan-
teri’s breathing—Konanteri’s, who had wept
a while ago on behalf of some unknown Snellman.

At last he heard the master’s footsteps. The
door opened and a voice asked:

“ Is Taavctti there? ”

No answer from the living-room. Taavetti
was away on business of his own and Jussi kept
quiet. The master came into the room, far
enough for him to catch sight of Jussi, at whom
he silently shook his fist and gnashed his teeth.
Then he was gone, and Jussi was left to crouch
on the bed and wait. The idea of running away
never occurred to him now.

Half an hour elapsed before the master returned.
He came, and seizing Jussi by the hair jerked him
on to the floor. And when Jussi tried in self-
defence to cling to his arms he said:

“ So you’d fight, would you? ”

The master was in such a rage that he nearly
wept. This miserable end to the evening boded
ill for his secret dreams which had circled all
through the evening on the approaching Diet
elections. At the first bend in the road a wheel
had come off the Rector’s trap and the Rector
had been badly hurt in the spill. The church-

THE POOR RELATION 93

warden’s wheel came off as he was climbing to
his seat, and that incident was the wolf-bailiff’s
salvation, for he was prompted to examine his
cart in time. The festivities at Tuorila had sud¬
denly lost all their glamour. And it was all
Jussi’s fault, Jussi’s, that wretched lout’s, whom
the master had kept for years, his vacant face
a constant secret stumbling-block in the path
of ambitious dreams, a reminder of the master’s
own former lowliness.

The struggle between the master and Jussi
woke up Konanteri.

“ Well now, I do believe I’m in that lad’s bed,”
muttered Konanteri with drowsy good-nature.

“You lie there as long as you like. That
bed’s vacant now,” the master said. Thrusting
Jussi out of the room he added: “ See, there’s
your road, the road you came by, back to where
you came from.”

Daylight had come by the time Jussi was on
the last lap of his tramp to Toivola, a cabin in
the backwoods. Naked spruce roots, thick as a
man’s waist, hung snakily over the yielding
track, which the sun was streaking with its
early morning beams. The hiding Jussi had
received had left behind it nothing like the same
bitterness as on that former occasion a year ago,
after the dance. He kept on repeating to
himself, his mind fixed on an image of Tuorila:

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94

‘ I’ll show you yet—you just wait.’ Saying that
kept his courage up, though he had no clear
idea of what he was going to show Tuorila.
Hunger and agitation tempered his spirit and
tended to bring tears to the eye of the cursing
seventeen-year old man. The misty backwoods
landscape seemed at that early hour to reveal
little traits familiar to him from childhood.

He had reached that stage of his youth when
anyone who had known him as a child would
still recognize him, while those who knew him
during the last years of his life might equally
easily have recognized him at a first glance. He
took, as it were, the first decisive steps towards
the fate that awaited him far ahead in the future.

Ill

TOWARDS MANHOOD

Jussi was not exactly made welcome to Toivola.
The hour was early enough for the family to be
still in bed, and when the visitor was recognized
as Jussi Tuorila, the idea spread that something
must be wrong. Jussi had to give repeated
assurances that nothing was wrong.

“ What’s brought you then? ”

“ Nothing special,” Jussi answered, smiling in
an embarrassed manner, and that was all he
could find to say. Miina, the mother, had
hastily pulled on a skirt and was fast losing her
temper. Kustaa had been out last night some¬
where in the direction of Tuorila. Miina stared
suspiciously at the bed where the lad, in an early
morning posture, was still asleep.

“ What have you louts been up to now? ”
she asked. The Toivola cabin stood on land
belonging to Tuorila; one had to be careful.

The master of the house, an old, weak-looking,
wizened fellow, looked on from his bed and had
apparently made up his mind to have nothing
whatever to do with the matter. Miina went
on wondering to herself; Jussi wriggled and
smiled, but was unable to give any satisfactory

95

MEEK HERITAGE

96

explanation. He was worried by Miina’s stub¬
born surprise; why couldn’t she let him feel at
home? Everything would settle down all right
then. At last Miina said:

“ Well, stretch yourself there beside the old
man, wherever you come from.” And she set
about completing her toilet.

Jussi took off his boots and coat and lay down
on the space newly vacated by Miina. He lay
there beside the silent old man in the wretched
cabin which he had entered before this only to
bring, as from a higher world, a message from
the master of Tuorila. The sleepless night and
his many unusual experiences combined to lend
to all his thoughts an air of not belonging to him;
the compulsory relation in which he suddenly
found himself to this dwelling was distasteful to
him—almost he regretted what had happened.

Just as sleep began to pervade his consciousness
he saw his old home Nikkila, lifelike and un¬
changed. His weary brain evoked the mirage
in self-defence, for its own rest and to release
for a moment his blindly struggling soul from the
associations of the recent past, and earlier, in
which it had continuously been fettered all
through the long years since the moment when
the sleigh was being loaded in front of the
Nikkila farmhouse one morning in the great
winter of death. So long ago that had been.
Jussi slept, a deeper sleep than he had known

TOWARDS MANHOOD 97

for seven years. And soon he “ saw 55 no more
dreams, yet deep, deeper even than the dream-
plane of his mind, poignant currents flowed
from the present to what once had been. It
was as though his deepest ego were moving
backwards towards the future.

The personal history of the subject of this tale
had reached a major crisis; he had to begin
life over again from a new starting-point. Before
him are long vain years leading to coming alien
times; Jussi’s life has reached a point at which
it might as well have ended. . . .

He slept without a break until evening. When
consciousness slowly returned to him, he noted
first that he was half-dressed, and then that
around him was a strange unnatural atmosphere;
it was not morning. The mysterious old master
of the house was sitting on the fireside bench
and Miina was fussing about and relating some
long history. The sons, Kustaa and his older
brother Iisakki, were eating, having apparently
just returned from somewhere. At once Jussi
became aware again of the curious relation in
which he stood to the people and life of this
house; he was compelled to look up even to
people living as modestly as this. He had wakened
so silently that no one appeared to be aware that
he was awake, and instinctively he made a sleepy
movement and pretended to be deep in slumber
again.

H

MEEK HERITAGE

98

Miina was speaking in a confidential voice:

. . He’s there, at our place—I says to him—
but I came to see what—I mean to say I’m not

keeping anybody’s farm-hands—I says-”

“ Ay, and what did the boss say to that? ”
asked Iisakki with his head in a can of sour mil k.

“ All he said was that he didn’t care where a
rascal like that had gone, but I says to him,
surely you can’t be thinking of driving your own
flesh and blood on to the road like that, with
only the rags he’s got on him to wear—I says—
happen he’ll have other clothes as well, in case
he finds a job of some kind—I says—and I’m
surely not expected to give him bed and board
for nothing—I says—he’ll not be going any¬
where from our place to-day at any rate, so that
if there’s anything I can take him—I says. . .

This news interested Jussi as soon as he became
aware that Miina had been to Tuorila; that
suspense was over, it seemed. Miina had even
brought his clothes. But she said nothing about
unscrewing wheels. And Kustaa merely went
on eating.

Iisakki asked: “ Didn’t he give you any

money? ”

Jussi kept his eyes shut, but he felt Miina’s
glance rest on the bed before she answered in an
altered tone:

“ I did say to the master what the right thing
would be to pay the boy a penny or two. Master

TOWARDS MANHOOD 99

tried to put me off by saying Jussi could come and
talk about wages himself, but I says to that,
you won’t catch that boy coming here any more
—I says—and then the mistress went and fetched
this twenty marks. But it’s no use giving it. . .

Miina made a gesture towards the bed and was
silent for a moment. Then, in her usual tone,
she went on:

“ But what do you think to that, going and
loosening the nuts on dozens of wheels—fancy
thinking of such a thing—a lout like a sleeping
man’s prayer when it comes to anything else,
you wouldn’t think he’d have thought of such a
thing. Sure you weren’t there last night, Kus-
taa ? For the day you start such games, I’ll...”

“ I haven’t touched anybody’s nuts,” Kustaa
answered in a surly tone.

Jussi pretended to be waking up; he stretched
himself, gasped and smacked his lips. Miina
looked in the direction of the bed, an expression
on her face wholly out of keeping with her latest
remark.

“ Ah, the champion nut-opener’s going to
begin his day, I see.”

Miina’s account of her visit to Tuorila made
Jussi feel more of a stranger than ever among
these people. In spite of everything, the seven
years he had spent at Tuorila had left their mark
on him. These were poor people, with a bent
for treachery. Even Kustaa now seemed very

MEEK HERITAGE

100

distant, and it looked as though Kustaa would
have preferred to see Jussi anywhere else than
in his home. If only he knew where to go —
But Miina had the twenty marks sent him from
Tuorila.

Jussi was given coffee and he then had his
supper alone. He had not eaten anything for
over a day, yet every morsel he ate seemed to
stick in his throat. A couch was made up for
him on a bench beneath the side-window. It
was hard and narrow; again no question of
undressing. Yet in spite of having slept all
through the day he was in such a state of lassi¬
tude that he fell asleep almost at once. But
when in the night he fell on to the floor he lay
awake for long, gazing at the turgid dark autumn
sky and listening to the sound of breathing, in
which was the same surfeiting alien note as in so
much else. In the watches of the night he
found no difficulty in seeing clearly, for the first
time, exactly what had befallen him.

Toivola was a solitary cabin in the middle of
the large tract of forest Tuorila had sold on such
favourable terms. Cutting was to begin here
already before Christmas. At Toivola the be¬
ginning of the forest work was eagerly awaited,
partly because of the employment it would bring,
partly because life would become livelier when
the lumbermen assembled. Miina was secretly

TOWARDS MANHOOD IOI

annoyed because she was so old—if only she had
been so and so many years younger. . . . But
even now she would see her way to making a
bit.

Jussi was permitted to stay on in the house.
A new cabin was being built at one side of the
yard; the roof, walls and fireplace were ready,
only the windows and floor remained to be done.
Iisakki had begun, when the autumn weather
set in, to put the cabin little by little into order,
and Jussi was now set to help him. Glib-tongued
Miina made it clear to him, however, that such
tr iflin g jobs in no way made up for the cost of
boarding him, but as there were hopes that he
might soon be earning money on his own,
she was willing to stake him for the time being.
When he started to get wages he could make up
for these weeks as well. Jussi listened to her
chatter, weary of his whole existence, and lay
awake at nights, sick at heart.

Then one Sunday after church-time life at
Toivola was suddenly transformed. Within a
couple of hours nearly fifty men, equipped with
provisions, saws and axes, arrived at the house.
In the yard was a great bustle as a dozen or so
horses and heavily-laden sleighs were being
temporarily put up there. Odds and ends in
the way of the sleighs were thrown aside; there
was a babble of strange dialects. A short, fresh-
complexioned foreman came into the house and

102 MEEK HERITAGE

while still on the threshold began shouting in
such a loud voice that even everlastingly silent
old man Toivola was startled and mumbled a
few incomprehensible words.

“ Well, Mammy, is the coffee-pot hot, for
you’ve got visitors,” the foreman bawled.

“ I don’t remember inviting anyone special
to-day,” Miina answered in the tone she would
have used if she really had been twenty years
younger.

“ The best visitors never wait for invitations.”

Before evening the Toivola cabin had lost
whatever individuality of its own it may have
had. The queerly cross attitude towards the
men which Miina had seen fit to adopt right
from the beginning made no difference. The
strangers made no effort to acquaint themselves
with the habits of the household. It was curious
to hear a newcomer loudly and blithely accost
“ Pa,” that silent dummy to whom no one in
ordinary circumstances ever addressed a word.
When, later in the evening, Miina began ostenta¬
tiously taking stock of her belongings, she was
told outright that no one in that crowd had longer
fingers than was necessary, and that if any
fingers did show a tendency to grow long, they
would be cut off no matter whose they were.

The first night was the hardest; the living-
room and bath-house were packed to the limit.

TOWARDS MANHOOD IO 3

“ A tight fit,” observed the foreman as he lay
down on the straw, “ but there’s a good cabin
in the yard only waiting for the finishing touches
to be put to it.”

In the morning a surprise awaited the Toivola
family. The whole forest gang was put to work
on the unfinished cabin. Someone had heard
that the glass from the old church windows
was for sale, with the result that the foreman—
Keinonen his name turned out to be—at once
went off to buy a supply. Before evening the
new Toivola cabin was being warmed for the
first time, and that night most of the men slept
there.

The following morning there was a general
move to see “ what kind of pines Pa Tuorila has
been growing for Pa Rosenlev.” In the living-
room Miina snapped at Jussi in the foreman’s
hearing:

“ Well, aren’t you going to ask for work, or
are you waiting for work to come bowing down
to you—living for weeks on what you’re going to
get some time.”

“ Get your axe, we want every man jack able
to walk,” the foreman replied, slapping his
gauntlets together.

On his way into the yard he asked, “ What’s
your name, young man? ”

Jussi was not sure at first which young man the
foreman meant. To make sure he asked:

MEEK HERITAGE

104

“ Whose name? ” The foreman took him by
the arm and said, “ Not whose, yours.”

So much ceremony confused Jussi: young
man—and then to have to say his name out
loud.

“Jussi, ay, but your surname? ”

A new problem. Jussi had never had any use
for a surname and wasn’t even quite sure whether
it didn’t mean a second Christian name.

“ What’s your place called? ” asked the fore¬
man.

Jussi cast a look round him and said, “Toi-
vola.”

And so Jussi, after having first been Jussi
Nikkila and then Jussi Tuorila, became Johan
Toivola. Under that name he began his first
exciting day as a real wage-earner. Difficulties
cropped up at once. Jussi had no gauntlets;
he had to get them from the foreman’s store¬
keeper as an advance on his wages. He had no
trimming-axe and no hewing-axe. The first
day seemed endless; the thought kept on re¬
curring to him that back of everything he had no
better home to go to than Toivola.

Winter wore on towards Christmas and work
in the forest settled into its normal grooves.
Most of the men still lived in the new cabin,
which because of the church glass used in its
windows had been dubbed the “ Temple.” In
the evenings cards were played there and usually

TOWARDS MANHOOD IO5

there was a terrific hubbub. Pedlars found their
way to the Temple, and already it was being
rumoured that girls were visiting the place.
Jussi slept in the old cabin with the older and
steadier men. He was still suffering from a
nameless sense of helplessness. Miina kept up
the nagging manner she had first adopted when
the men came, and snapped at everybody, but
Jussi she appeared to hate. Jussi was Iisakki’s
chum at the tree-felling. Iisakki took charge
of their joint earnings, and on the first two pay¬
days Jussi never even saw his wages. He was
given his food at Toivola, but nothing had been
said about what he was to pay for it. He
guessed that his earnings were the same as Iisak¬
ki’s, and Iisakki had plenty of money, and so had
Kustaa, who had become a driver. Jussi once
affected surprise at this state of things to Kustaa.

“ Iisakki’s won at cards,” retorted Kustaa with
the air of an expert. Kustaa had adopted
from the outset an attitude of cold superiority
in his dealings with Jussi. He seemed entirely
to have forgotten the night of the celebration
at Tuorila, and whenever Jussi tried to approach
him in a fellow-adventurer spirit, he turned surly.
Now, too, when Jussi complained about his lack
of money, he said:

“What do you want money for? Do you
think mother’s not going to charge you anything
for all that time she was keeping you? ”

106 MEEK HERITAGE

“Yes, but your lot got twenty marks from,
my uncle,” ventured Jussi, who was beginning to
feel aggrieved.

But at that Kustaa snarled with a new venom,
“ What are you talking about, hey! ”

The whole forest with the working gang, the
foreman and everything seemed to be ranged
behind Kustaa. And Jussi was alone against
them all, in peril of being thrashed.

A playful fellow—that foreman. He hardly
ever says anything out straight in a serious voice.
But this joking manner of his is a mask behind
which he hides other traits of character, traits
that are difficult to define, but which are cer¬
tainly lacking in those under his orders. Hard
to say what they are—all one knows is that he
is the boss and the others the gang. The men
are familiar enough with him, but were they to
attempt to find out which of them was most
intimate with him, they would be baffled.
They might conceivably discover that no one
really knows the boss intimately.

The person who prides herself on knowing
him best is Miina Toivola; no one answers
him back as boldly as Miina. Keinonen sees
through Miina and Miina is convinced that she
sees through Keinonen. But in one matter
Miina carries on as it were a private game out¬
side of Keinonen’s sphere; and perhaps she
really fancies that she is a whit sharper than

TOWARDS MANHOOD I 07

Keinonen. For which reason Keinonen in his
own good time blandly spoils Miina’s hand.

Keinonen had noticed on one occasion that
Jussi had no money, although pay-day was only
just behind and Jussi had had no opportunity
of spending his money.

“ Don’t you know there’s a rule in these forests
that a man’s got to have money on him? ” he
said to Jussi with playful severity. And when
pay-day came round again he gave each man
his money separately instead of paying them in
pairs, as they worked.

“ It’ll save you the trouble of sharing out,”
he explained.

Jussi saw his wages for the first time, more
than seven marks.

But that evening when Jussi arrived at the
cabin there was storm in the air. Iisakki had
hurried home before him. Iisakki and Kustaa
were sitting at table, and Jussi made for his
usual place beside them; the formality of
invitations had been dispensed with long ago.
But no spoon had been set for him, and when he
asked for one Miina said, controlling herself:

“ Them as has their own money finds their
own spoons.”

Jussi went to the shelf to fetch himself a spoon,
whereupon Miina, in an outburst of fury, struck
him on the hand with a ladle.

“ A devilish pack of trouble all of a sudden,”

MEEK HERITAGE

108

she screeched, “ when a woman has to be watch¬
ing her property every second to see it’s safe;
let me tell you . .

That was only the beginning of a deluge, the
chief contents of which were that Jussi had been
fed for many a long week after he had been
kicked out by his employers as a good-for-
nothing rogue, and not a penny had he paid all
that time—and so on. Keinonen was in his
j oiliest mood when he came into the house in
the middle of it and in his pleasantest Savo
dialect began to lay the ground for Miina’s
thorough discomfiture.

“ What’s mammy’s own little boy been doing
now to make his mammy so cross? ” was his
first sly question. And having, by his own
methods, reduced Miina’s flow of language to
gasps, he proceeded to find out how long the
young man had been at Toivola. Then he
asked how much Jussi was supposed to be paying
per day.

“ I charge him what I see fit, and that’s my
business, and I say nobody’s going to play the
judge in this shack,” Miina retorted.

The men exchanged sly smiles, as though in
their opinion Keinonen was getting the worst
of it.

“ Now don’t start reminding us about shacks,”
said Keinonen silkily. “ Don’t you remember
how quickly we got that other shack into shape?

TOWARDS MANHOOD IOg

Why, we could put together another shack like
it from the ground up in a jiffy.” And Keinonen
went on to say that Miina could charge the young
man at the same rate as she was charging him,
and asked Jussi how much he had paid so far.
Jussi explained that two of his pay-days had gone
to the family and that Miina had already been
given twenty marks by his uncle. . . . But at
that Miina exploded, and this new explosion
was even more terrific than the previous one;
she screamed, shook and wept. Even Keinonen
blushed, and it was in a voice that this gang had
never heard him use before that he at last
thundered:

“ If you don’t stop that lip, there’s going to be
real trouble for you to rave about.”

An angry silence was the result. Keinonen
turned slowly on his heel and cast a stern, all-
embracing look on the other occupants of the
room, though no one had whispered a word.

There had never been, and never was to be
again, any other occasion in Jussi’s life when
justice was so amply meted out to him. The
upshot of the affair was that Jussi was allowed
to keep his present wages, and Keinonen promised
to see that Miina henceforward got her due.
He also promised to look into that matter of the
twenty marks. Miina was crestfallen; her help¬
less rage found its only vent in' snorts and a

IIO MEEK HERITAGE

cautious slamming of objects. But Jussi was
thereafter to sleep in the Temple.

In the yard Jussi fingered the down that was
beginning to grow on his face and listened to the
noises made by the horses and the murmur of
talk from the men. For the first time in his life
he had money of his own in his pocket; it was
wrapped up in a rag, and his hand kept on stray¬
ing to it. Standing there alone he sensed the
power behind the forest works. Forest work—
the idea behind the words led somewhere up¬
ward, to gentlemen of ever increasing might and
importance; there was money there, so much
money that there was no end to it. There was
something scaring, something almost overpowering,
in being in touch with the source of money in this
way. Money was a queer thing; it seemed to
lay vague demands on him.

He crossed over to the Temple, where he was
to sleep that night. Card-games and a cheerful
medley of voices were uppermost in the impression
made on him by the room. To-morrow is
Sunday and we shall all be going together to
church. The coming day of rest tends to make
the men good-natured and lazily playful. Men
from different parts of the country tell each other
ghost stories and adventures with wolves. The
talk gradually flickers and dies down until one
of the men begins his regular evening fabrication
of astounding lies, spurred on to ever new efforts

TOWARDS MANHOOD HI

of invention by the half-bawdy comments of the
others. Someone recalls the row to which Jussi
had given rise in the other cabin, and for a
little while he is the butt of humorous remarks.
Jussi takes their jokes stiffly, a little surlily, but
no one is sufficiently interested in him to start
baiting him in earnest. Jussi is felt to be an
overgrown lad, too soft yet for this crowd.

At last the men begin to drop down on the
straw. The prevailing mood is unusually gentle
this Saturday night. The married men think
of their earnings and of what they are going to
do with them when they are safely settled down
at home again, the young men think of to¬
morrow’s journey to church. The spirit of the
forest gang has found its romantic pitch.

Jussi thinks of his altered relations with Miina
Toivola and of his homeless state. He remembers
his mother as she was when they set out together
for Tuorila. He even dwells in memory on the
night of her death, which stands out solitary,
apart from every other moment of time in the
picture of life that has formed in his mind.
Do tears still rise to his eyes?

To Jussi it seemed that his trust in Keinonen’s
goodwill had been premature and exaggerated.
When, having foolishly lost his money at cards
to the other men, he demanded, almost tearfully,
his money back, Keinonen no longer resorted

1 12 MEEK HERITAGE

to his authority on Jussi’s behalf, but joined in
the jokes cut at his expense. So that was what
the world was like after all: in the last resort
you found yourself alone. Jussi gradually forgot
his sentimental evening dreams of his mother
and of former days on Pig Hill and at Nikkila.
Already winter was on the wane; the sleigh-
tracks had a watery gleam and the felled pines
spread a scent of spring. On his departure
from Tuorila the earth had been bare; the winter
that had then loomed so largely before him,
too long for his thoughts even to attempt to range
to what lay beyond it, was now retreating.
What particular part of the time that lay behind
him had been the endless-seeming winter en¬
visaged by him?

On the ice, booms were already being linked
together to enclose the rafts of logs. The weeks
lost their settled atmosphere of hard continuous
labour; the floating season was drawing near,
Tuorila would soon be left standing here with
its master and mistress and the money they had
received. Of the magnificent trees only the
stumps and tops, branches and bark-shavings
were left in the forest, always in the same order,
so that they formed on the surface of the earth
a lightly sketched picture of the fate that had
befallen the vanished trees. After days of in¬
creasing light the hour came at last when in the

TOWARDS MANHOOD II 3

Toivola Temple only a moveless stuffy air re¬
mained of all the winter’s happenings. On
that sunny day even Miina could not help
feeling a vague melancholy.

Most of the forest-cutters applied for floating
work, among them Jussi—Johan Toivola. He
bought, acting on his own in perfect liberty, a
new pair of top-boots, and still acting for himself
began to procure his food from the houses in
the villages along the floating channels. A
growing sense of manhood filled his mind.
There was dignity in the feeling, but at the same
time it weighed a little on his spirits. The
money he possessed made him feel restless;
it was as though it was always silently demanding
to be used for something.

Slowly the great raft crossed the broads along
the south-western watercourse, making for the
river Kokemaenjoki. On the pontoon a fire
burned constantly under a coffee-pot and in the
shelter of the hut the men played cards. The
horse plodded on its eternal circuit round the
windlass. Beside it Keinonen greases his
boots.

“ Baptist, hurry along now! ” calls out the
man whose turn it is with Jussi to row ashore for
food. A ducking had caused someone to refer
to Jussi as John the Baptist, and thereafter that,
shortened to Baptist, has been his name on
1

MEEK HERITAGE

1 14

the raft. Should a newcomer, on being regaled
with tales about the shrew Miina at Toivola,
ask who the woman was, the answer is, “See
Baptist over there? She’s his mother.”

Jussi goes ashore, to a different farm again
to-day. His experience is constantly broadening.
The relations between men and women, of which
his knowledge had gained little in exactitude since
his Pig Hill days, become thoroughly clear to
him during the course of this floating season.
He gets drunk and experiences for the first time
that peculiarly human state, which invariably
manages to combine two wholly contrasting
elements.

Life is broad and outwardly care-free, yet at
bottom a vague sense of shelterlessness persists.
When this ends, where then?

Even after the floating season was over Jussi
was not turned adrift. He stayed on as one of
Keinonen’s men. In the forests now in the market,
the trees had to be counted before it was safe
to buy them, for here and there farmers had
already begun to set such stiff prices on their forest
that it would have been unwise to close with
them in the old fashion. Jussi thus became one
of the counters, and by the time that job was
finished the lumbering season was soon under
way; the Satakunta forests were being well

TOWARDS MANHOOD II 5

bled. The break with the old, of which starving
sowers had dreamed in the fine spring of 1868,
was now being realized, and—as commonly
happens in such cases—in a manner very unlike
the dream.

Jussi grew up to manhood during the years he
was a “ company’s ” man. Chance had made
him a wandering worker, though he never really
grew used to the part. After the first year was
over and he was again felling trees, with a forest
cabin for camp, he already knew the ins and outs
of a lumberman’s life, and the following years
did little to develop him. He would willingly
have taken a hiring as a farm-hand, only the
locality was everywhere strange to him and
he had no wish to return to the neighbourhood
of Tuorila. Reserved though he had become by
nature, he felt himself drawn, ever since those
Toivola days, to his present familiar circle be¬
cause his companions never all changed at the
same time. Whenever his thoughts now turned
in the evenings to the past, they invariably ended
up at his early days at Toivola before work in the
forest had begun; and he thought of them as of a
peril from which he had unwittingly been saved.
He had actually to reassure himself that he need
never go back there, that there really was no
forgotten circumstance that might yet compel
him to return to that state. He had left no
debts behind him, taken nothing away with him

MEEK. HERITAGE

116

—or had he? No—they had no claim on him
whatever.

His Tuorila days lay already so far behind that
h i s thoughts now never reached so far. A
picture of the house might suddenly form in
his mind, but it awakened no response in him .
The master, mistress and children at Tuorila
were farther removed from him than anything
else, almost as though they had never existed.
Those times and those conditions: the standing
around in the bakery, the clean bed, they had
been wiped off the slate of his mind. Life began
from the moment of his arrival at Toivola, and
the entire contents of his present existence lay
in the fact that he need never return there.

Until even this mood became rare.

At the age of twenty-one he was of medium
height, a slightly bow-legged, grey-complexioned
man with square-cut hair. In a crowd he tended
to disappear; no one bothered for long to make
him a target for jokes. Many live the most
intensive years of their life during their wander-
years, piling up adventures which they later-
after time has gilded them—never weary of re¬
lating. Not so with Jussi. In his moments of
rest he would be conscious that the raft was now
floating down such-and-such waters and that the
houses on the banks were now so and so. At
the most he might remember where he had been
last year at this time and note his own full

towards manhood ny

acquaintance with a lumberman’s job. Around
him are men of many kinds. Some go ashore
on mysterious errands of their own. Jussi is
incapable of going anywhere on his own. There
are girls ashore, but somehow they all seem to be
older than he is. He does not know how to
behave with girls, except in his private longings.
He cannot even talk bawdy about them as
smoothly as the other men, let alone steal into
their attics on his own initiative as he knows some
of his companions do.

Somehow the summers pass. And in those
summers were moments of such beauty that
although Jussi is not specially sensitive to beauty
he could not help being affected by them. On
one lovely Trinity Sunday morning a steamer—
a fireboat—passes the raft, bound from town on a
country run, with a band on board playing
lustily a tune familiar to all from their childhood.
A faint tremor of agitation and devoutness passes
through the men’s minds; here and there a man
hums weirdly distorted words, the meaning of
which he neither understands nor feels any
need to understand.

For the moment all are solemn and moved.
Keinonen says, “ Now boys, all in the same
uniform and off to church! ”

The company’s stock of clothes is in the same
boat as the other stores. Each of the men is
given a red coat, white trousers, a shiny belt

MEEK HERITAGE

118

and a peaked cap; then quickly into the boats
and off towards the soft greenery of the church¬
yard. Only an old sickly cottar, the owner of
the horse, is left on the raft. The steamer has
already disappeared behind the tiny headland
before the boats are halfway there. Jussi is
at one of the oars. The moment is richly
harmonious; the lands and forests seem to be
trying to indicate that the nation is living through
its happiest years in their spirit. Along the
thousands of lake shores waves plash their secret
message, to which, somewhere in this corner of
the country, a great gentle-hearted poet is
listening. The red-coated men who are now
landing from their boat do not know what a
poet is, but the message of the waves penetrates
with childish ease to their subconscious minds.
They are company’s men, capable of cursing
fluently; yet the crust is very thin over the soft
and pure unspoiled souls admired by the poet
each time he happened to pass near to men of
their kind.

A spirit of exaltation surges through Jussi’s
mind as well, as he stands up or bows his neck in
church with the others. The elevated atmo¬
sphere of the church eases the inexplicable
inward strain under which his torpid life has
lain during the past years, a strain which he has
consciously recognized only as a vague feeling

TOWARDS MANHOOD II9

of being exposed. What years have accumulated,
a single moment may brush away. The church
is full of worshippers who have come from their
own homes and can look forward to a com¬
fortable Sunday afternoon in their own yards.
The singing and Word of God that billows so
freely in the sunny air of the church seems to be
reaching out to these people and the yards
awaiting them. In this place Keinonen seems
to shrink and lose his power. His choicest
witticism would here be as nothing against the
tinkle that arises each time the sexton changes
the numbers on his black gilt-framed board
and then turns it round again for the congrega¬
tion to see. The red coats are part of Keinonen,
and Jussi for one is ashamed of his own coat.
It makes him feel as though he were being forced
to speak Keinonen 5 s funny dialect.

Along such paths as these Jussi’s thoughts
wandered all through the sermon. He re¬
membered the sickly old cottar left behind on
the pontoon, remembered him as he looked when
he thrust his wages into a leather bag, notes and
coins all mixed up together. Solemn as it was
in church, the old cottar seemed to be nearer
to Jussi than Keinonen and the red-coated
lumbermen. The cottar was of those who go
from church to their homes, of those who have
hymn-books and handkerchiefs.

120 MEEK HERITAGE

The sermon was a long one, and Jussi had
time to become lost in a dream that he too would
soon be going home to a church-day breakfast
of gruel and potato-stew. Nowhere does the
human imagination, even the stiffest-jointed,
roam with such ease as in church at sermon-time
on a summer day. It grated on Jussi’s sensibilities
to have to go back to his boat when the service
was over. There was no help for it, he had to go,
but the trip to church marked for him a change
in the inward contents of the summer.

In the autumn Keinonen took his men into
the parish where Jussi had come into the world;
Jussi even helped to count the fine untouched
timber in the forests belonging to his birthplace
Nikkila. Many, indeed, were the forests he
had tramped with Keinonen since their first
association at distant Tuorila. But now it hap¬
pened that one morning Keinonen failed to
awake. No one had seen him die; in his death
there was the same touch of mystery as in his
life.

The work was then nearly finished, and by the
time the new boss arrived the men were ready
to depart, for it was early yet for the cutting to
begin in that district. Jussi was the only one to
stay on; his explanation was that he would
wait for the winter work to begin, but he had a

TOWARDS MANHOOD 121

feeling that there would be no more lumbering
for him. Not that he had any definite plans;
it only seemed to him that several circumstances
pointed in that direction. He was twenty-
four years old, but among the lumbermen he
still felt himself a mere boy. The state of mind
that had reached its culmination during that last
visit to church had returned again and again,
and it was perhaps under its influence that he
had begun to save money. And when Keinonen
died it was to Jussi almost like a sign that he, too,
had finished with the gang. Also the coincidence
that he had returned to the place of his birth
was not without significance; there were people
still living in the locality whom he recognized,
although they, like the surrounding landscape,
had entirely lost the atmosphere of those times
before the famine. Gone were Pa Ollila, Pen-
jami, the old Nikkila farm-house, the cabin on
Pig Hill. But once he ran across an old woman
who, as she stirred her coffee-pot, asked him
in a moved voice about the manner of Maija’s
death.

He was an alien in the place, and at first he
felt less secure than when he had been a com¬
pany’s man; the way his money melted annoyed
him. Yet he could not make up his mind
to leave with the other men. Who knows what
his real reasons may have been for staying, for

122 MEEK HERITAGE

everything was totally unlike his dreams on that
Trinity Sunday?

The former little Jussi of Nikkila became a big
farm-hand at Pirjola, a farm near the village
where he was born.

The ’eighties had begun.

IV

THE HEART OF LIFE

When a man returns to his birthplace after
roving the earth, he needs to be a better man
than those who have stayed at home. One
expects of him good clothes, money and an air
of superiority. He has to be a good dancer and
a smart fellow with the girls. If he fulfils all
these requirements, he is a success. He can find
a job as overseer on a farm, a farmer’s daughter
for wife, a good croft to live on; before he
grows too old he buys a farm and by skilful
management succeeds in paying off the mort¬
gage. All this may happen, and has often
happened; there is nothing in the existing order
to prevent it. Yet how ludicrous the idea of a
career of this kind seems in connection with our
friend Juha—in his own parish Jussi has become
Juha.

His former home, Nikkila, is now the best
farm in the village, or at any rate quite the
equal of Ollila. The farmhouse where Pa
Ollila’s son Anttoo lives with hri strong-willed
wife is new and imposing. The wife is of prou
farming stock and people say that she remse to
set her foot in the old stuffy house at Nikkila.

123

MEEK HERITAGE

124

Nor was she called upon to do so, for at the
time when Anttoo took over the farm builders
were willing to work for their food only; car¬
penters from the North jostled their way by main
force into the job; indeed, they all but fought
for a chance to help on the building. For the
Ollila clan never ran short of bread; Pa Ollila,
watching the walls of his son’s house rise from
the road, observed: “ It’s all right so long as
your bread and your money lasts.”

Before autumn the main building had been
completed, the out-houses had been repaired
and a large garden plot cut off from the adjoin¬
ing field and surrounded with a stout stone
fence. The mistress moved in before Christmas.
And to those who after that remembered Nikkila
as it used to be, it was as though Penjami and
his crowd with him had been banished for some
shameful reason after having wrongfully occu¬
pied the place too long. Life was spacious and
clean there now. Not one of the farm-hands
had yet seen the mistress in her shift as they
might have seen Maija any evening. The elder
son went to school in the church village. Pen-
jami’s old untouched forest had now been sold
for the first time. The former disreputable
Nikkila had become one of the solidest farms in
the locality.

Beside such matters Juha’s adventures out in
the world paled to insignificance. Obviously

THE HEART OF LIFE 125

he could expect nothing better than a job at
Pirjola as man-of-all-work. Pirjola was a small
old-fashioned farm; he was the only farm-hand.
There was one maid.

One Sunday afternoon Juha set off along the
highway, making instinctively towards Harja-
kangas village to see all these changes. He has
on his new creaky top-boots; in his pocket he
has over twenty marks He remembers his age
and notes in that connection that he is a full-
grown man. The former little Jussi Nikkila a
man—so time passes. When he saw the im¬
provements in the Nikkila yards, he thought:
‘You have altered, but so have I.’ Old Pen-
jami had never once come into his mind during
the past few years, but now Jussi remembered
him, and strangely enough he felt sympathy for
his dead father. As he walked past Nikkila
towards Ollila, his gait and the expression on his
face unconsciously reflected something of old
Penjami’s arrogance. A faint defiance vibrated
within him as he thought of the present owners
of Nikkila and Ollila. Men like them lording it
here and selling forests; little they know of
lumbering. We’ve seen forests like these before,
we have—and the Nikkila forests once belonged
to Penjami, Juha’s father. And then this fellow
goes and sells it as though it was his. As Jussi
strides on he almost looks as though he had
recently sold the Nikkila forest. The knowledge

MEEK HERITAGE

iq6

that he has money in his pocket is a source of
unspeakable satisfaction to him. No one can
guess, merely looking at a man, how much
money that man may have in his pocket.

Juha did not return from his walk until late,
and when he retraced his journey he was a little
drunk. Between Ollila and Nikkila he attempted
a yell: “Ollila skinflints!” He is Penjami
Nikkila’s son, and don’t you forget it. But he
did not yell loudly; he heard the sound only in
his own brain, in his consciousness, which the
drink seemed somehow to have stripped naked;
it seemed to be looking on from inside him as he
strode forward deep in admiration of his father
Penjami. It looked on and would not be driven
away. ‘ Ay, these were once Penjami’s forests,
but he has lost them beyond recall. That may
anger you, but it all happened in perfectly legal
fashion. Walking about and telling yourself
you’re the son of the man who owned the farm
and forests and that you—yah!—Look you, this
is a different farm now, it’s got nothing at all to
do with your father, it’s Anttoo Ollila’s farm,
understand? Anttoo is his father’s son, Pa
Ollila’s, who came from Kokemaki. That’s the
way you’ve got to look at matters, and then
you’re on the right track. You’re going now to
the Pirjola living-room to sleep, but don’t for¬
get!—you’ve got over twenty marks in your
pocket. Go ahead with your thinking from that

THE HEART OF LIFE 127

point. Look at other people, see how they live
in the world that’s around you.’

So the consciousness that was behind his in¬
toxication went on, though it used no words.

And Juha, who used to be Jussi, went to bed
in the Pirjola living-room that Sunday night and
on many following Sunday and week-day nights.
He was a quiet farm-hand, whose family circum¬
stances were well known to the older people in
these parts; the stock he came from was revealed
clearly enough in his smallish eyes, in which
those who knew could detect a hint of old Pen-
jami, though the man’s nature certainly re¬
sembled more that of his mother Maija. He
was queer in some ways, but not enough for
him to be specially talked about for that reason.
Thus, he had an odd way with money. He took
out his wages to the last penny, which made the
master regard him as a spendthrift. But Juha
no longer wasted his money; he only wanted to
have his money in his own possession. It was
not thrift, for a thrifty farm-hand abstains from
taking out his wages as long as possible.

He stayed one year at Pirjola. His com¬
panion in service was a maid well on in years,
who left at the end of the year to get married.
“ It depends on the farm whether a maid finds
a husband or not,” declared the master of Pir¬
jola, and he repeated this remark a couple of
years later when Juha—then back again at Pir-

MEEK HERITAGE

128

jola—was fixed to marry the maid Riina, also in
service at Pirjola.

The most intensive inward experiences of a
farm-hand or farm-maid invariably occur be¬
tween a Sunday afternoon and Monday mor ning
The time in question is for persons of their status
a fateful period sown with pitfalls. The fleeting
sense of liberty is then at its height, expan ding
as the evening wears on until during the night the
demands and proper proportions of life within
the social framework are liable to be wholly
forgotten.

Many an unrecorded fate has taken a decisive
turn on the night before Monday morning.
That night has been the treacherously fascinating
portal to a life of hardships, the gateway to
marriage and a subsequent grinding in the mill
of reality. And in that mill no trace remains of
the sweetness of a past Sunday night. It means
days of hard work and nights of killing frost, sick
children and a wife grown careless and flabby,
looking on whom one no longer remembers what
she looked like when she was a girl—girl indeed,
can the word ever have applied to a creature of
her appearance? It means the loss of children
and cows, leaking huts and arrears of work. It
means everything except moments of harmony,
for in the jaws of that mill no one loves his or
her nearest. The rare moments in a cottage

THE HEART OF LIFE I2g

yard on Sunday mornings, still in shirt-sleeves,
these are too insignificant to count much. Even
at such moments nothing is so distant and unreal
as the Sunday night on which it all began. It
is always a melancholy sight to see a farm-hand
and maid gravely attempting to imitate some¬
thing which, if it is to succeed at all, calls for
quite different qualifications.

Juha ought to have had experience enough of
the treacherousness of Sunday afternoon’s spell
of liberty. Had it not once at Tuorila led to a
shameful beating ? But the common property of
all vice is that at the decisive moment it compels
its victim to forget altogether the consequences
of previous indulgence, and the vice of enjoying
to the full one’s liberty is no exception.

One could indeed hardly expect a person at
Juha’s stage of development to extract wisdom
from hidings and Monday morning wearinesses
and then take that wisdom for guide. Every
Sunday evening, especially in summer, he set
out to roam the village. He went to dances,
although even the polka was too difficult for
him. Sometimes he became a party to a mild
spree. Nothing serious happened to him on such
occasions. He was often present when a fight
started, but was never among the victims. He
was cautious about buying drink; for some
reason he was afraid to club money with others
for the purchase of spirits. Again it was not

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130

thrift; he was only afraid of the responsibility
incurred. But as he was never any trouble to
anyone, he was often given drinks.

Nothing happened to Juha on his Sunday
evening outings. Or so it seemed. Perhaps fate
had shown greater cunning than usual in its
disposition of the consequences of these outings.
One outing had after all quite decisive conse¬
quences which later, as decade gave way to
decade, led his hitherto fairly colourless life into
channels where in its own inwardness it strikingly
reflects a certain side of human life.

Although Juha op. these solitary outings of bis
affected to regard himself as a person of some
wisdom and worldly experience, he was annoy¬
ingly aware of one great deficiency in himself:
he was still without experience of any kind in
regard to women. In company he acted other¬
wise; he would slowly unfold a knowing coarse
remark and give well-disposed married women
an opportunity to remark, “ Juha’s not so soft
as to let any woman hook him.”

Juha enjoyed unspeakably remarks of this kind
and acted with increased assurance the part of
one who has had enough of that sort of thing.
But when he returned to his lonely bed and
heard Riina, the maid, breathing on the other
side of the fireplace, that was another matter.
He had never touched a woman, there was the
rub. And although Riina was no better than

THE HEART OF LIFE 131

she should be, Juha would have given anything
to be bold enough to steal across the living-room
to Riina’s bed. One night, when a dead silence
on the other side of the fireplace made it seem
likely that Riina was awake, Juha crept in her
direction, coughing as he crept, only to find that
she was not in her bed. He stretched himself
out in the empty bed and lingered there a while.
But when Riina returned home from the village,
Juha was already back in his own bed, pretending
to be asleep.

Riina was two and twenty, a girl lacking in
ballast and loose-natured. She did not come
from these parts; the master had hired her at
market partly out of a sense of humour when
she asked him for a job. She did her work
apathetically and ran away at night as often as
she dared. Young men were afraid to venture
into the Pirjola living-room at night, but so far
as Riina was concerned there was no need for
them to do so. The strangeness of the locality
was no hindrance to Riina even on her first
Sunday night. She sang in a whinneying voice
her own country dance tunes in the living-room,
to vanish later into the village, whence she
returned some time after midnight. Circum¬
stances alone made her the object of Julia’s
secret dreams. She did not seem to take any
interest in Juha; she whinnied her songs to her¬
self and on being addressed by him gave any

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132

careless answer. But Juha’s imagination went
on working.

The fateful Sunday night came at the turn of
July—harvest-time. Juha’s sense of being alive
was at its height that evening; it accumulated
so many new shades that from Juha’s subconscious
mind the wordless question kept on floating up:

‘ Is this I ? am I living the fullness of my man¬
hood? ’

That evening he drank spirits for which he
paid; together with two other men he bought a
jugful. Then, drunk, to a dance. And there it
befell that a man seized Juha by the lapels of
his coat, and Juha thrust the man on his back
on to a bed. It was only play; nevertheless
the marvel had occurred that Juha had laid
another man on his back. On his way out Juha
made grabs at the girls in the dark porch, and
as he puffed homewards alone towards Pirjola,
the emotion uppermost in his mind was a strong
conviction that he had long been the equal of
anybody in this neighbourhood, for that matter
of anyone else anywhere.

He entered the dim living-room and went
boldly to see whether Riina was at home. Not
yet, said the empty bed. Juha moved cautiously
to the window and remained standing there.
His brain did nothing of its own volition, but
seemed merely to gaze on whatever was brought
before it. In quick flashes there appeared to it

THE HEART OF LIFE I 33

the inward visage of intoxication and even of the
secret well-spring of all life, but too rapidly for
Juha to grasp them. From his body came
messages of a faint nausea, but his soul refused
to accept them.

Along the twilit path came Riina, escorted by
two men. Behind his intoxication Juha found
pleasure in the thought that those men will not
come into the living-room, but Riina will.
Juha remained beside the window until Riina
opened the door. Then he made towards Riina.

For the first time in his life Johan Penjami’s-
son, at the age of twenty-six, holds the whole of
a woman in his arms. He does it under the
shelter of his drunkenness and the previous ex¬
periences of the day; again his body acts on its
own, automatically, his brain merely notes what
happens. The whole being of the man is loosened
from the fixed past and floats in air. The woman
offers little resistance; she is fatalistically slack.
At last she says:

“ What’s put so much life in the old ram all
of a sudden? ”

To Juha her words are bliss. They form as it
were a firm resting-place for his being, that is
now so strangely afloat.

But when, later, he is back in his own bed,
his intoxication has faded. He experiences one
of the deepest disappointments a man, even a
better man than he, ever finds befall him. He

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134

is overwhelmed by a torpid emptiness; never¬
theless life and the world turn an entirely new
face on him as they watch him lying there. One
brief event has again as it were gathered up all
the countless little events of the past farm-hand
years and welded them into one whole; he has
reached a new platform on the path of his life,
whether higher or lower than the one preceding
it matters little. Before sleep comes to him, he
has already perhaps seen himself in a coming
part as the man in a little cabin. At this stage
such fancies can still be pleasing enough.

It was a significant coincidence that Juha’s
advances came at such an opportune moment for
the maid Riina. Such perfectly dovetailing
coincidences do occur in life. Riina was abso¬
lutely without home ties of any kind and had
further good reason to suspect that she was with
child by a man who she knew would never marry
her. For although it has sometimes happened
that the heir to a farm has married a maid,
Riina knew well enough that she was not the
kind of maid of whom farmwives are made, least
of all after matters had fallen out as they had.
Her attitude towards Juha had hitherto been
non-committal; there were thus none of those
hidden antipathies which in cases of this kind
occasionally lead to talk of a woman’s martyr¬
dom. Riina went to dances as before, but was

THE HEART OF LIFE

*35

wholly faithful to her Juha. A touch of brazen¬
ness had crept into her behaviour, as though to
meet in advance any gossip that might arise
about her.

After what had happened marriage was to
Juha something axiomatic that needed no further
consideration. The whole of his inward life,
and in part also his outward actions, were con¬
ditioned by that fact. A pleasant anxiety took
possession of him when he made plans and
estimates for the future. His henceforward
nightly visits to Riina at the far side of the
fireplace were only a minor detail that had to
be looked after along with business of greater
importance. For him, Riina was wholly and
solely the woman he was to marry. He knew
nothing about Riina’s circumstances or birth—
they had been married some months when an
old woman like a blackbird, whom Juha rightly
took to be Riina’s mother, paid a visit to them—
and as they lay side by side they never spoke to
each other of marriage. What was there to speak
about? Juha tended to be absentminded and
Riina fatalistic, and no agitating scenes took
place between the two.

Juha did his work rather more carefully than
usual. The master, who was keen-scented, was
soon aware how matters stood, and being a
good judge of character and a juror at the circuit
court, was content to bide his time. By adroit

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I36

manipulation, however, he once led Juha to take
up the matter of his own accord, and once the
subject had been broached it was thrashed out
to the end. The master found out how Juha
stood as regards money and heard his plans.
Juha was hoping for a crofter’s holding on Pirjola
land.

The master looked quietly elsewhere as though
thinking it over. In reality he had no need to
think the plan over even for a moment. He saw
before him Juha, Riina and the money, three
things that at the moment were childishly beg¬
ging for recognition as an admirable and promis¬
ing foundation for an independent existence, but
whose inherent insufficiency for the part the aged
farmer saw with relentless clarity. Goodwill,
pity and aversion blended in his attitude towards
the matter, but he would not be a party to it.
He therefore gave no definite answer to Juha’s
hints about a croft, but displayed all the more
sympathy for and interest in the coming marriage.
He gave Juha a few paternal, manly words of
advice, with the result that Juha was in no wise
downcast by the interview, but on the contrary
let his hopes soar ever higher. During the rest
of his life Juha retained the warmest feelings for
the old master of Pirjola. Later on, when the
master was already invalided by old age, Juha
would sometimes turn to him in his difficulties
and invariably met with such overflowing friend-

THE HEART OF LIFE 137

liness that the actual object of his visit might
remain unspoken. Juha’s life was on an upward
grade the whole of the time he was at Pirjola—
right to his wedding, the entire cost of which
was borne by the master.

It was Riina who first mentioned the word
marriage, speaking in a familiar bad-tempered
voice and letting slip offhand how matters were
with her. There ought not to have been any¬
thing unexpected in that, yet Juha felt the
agonized sweat break out on his brow. There
was little of the bold lumberman in Juha that
evening. His thoughts hammered away at pos¬
sible and impossible ideas all at the same time.
The question of marriage was suddenly fraught
with entirely new meaning; now it really was
inevitable, and it had to be accomplished within
a definite space of time. Where to go to live?
Pay rent to live in a corner of somebody else’s
room—that was a terrifying thought. Even if
the master were to stake off a cottar’s holding for
him, there wouldn’t be time to build even a
three-walled hut. His money wouldn’t stretch
to anything like the total sum needed, and he
was himself incapable of shaping the logs for the
walls of a house. Juha gasped and twisted in
Riina’s bed. Riina merely lay still in an indo¬
lent attitude as though she were enjoying Juha’s
perturbation.

In the daytime Juha worked harder than ever,

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138

as though trying in that way to keep his dreams
of a croft alive, although as the time grew
shorter his chances of obtaining one shrank.
Riina’s condition was by now obvious to all and
tended to arouse queerly unpleasant moods in
Juha. Something alien seemed to be drawing
nearer to him, something with which he could
feel no connection whatever, but which notwith¬
standing reached out towards him. In Juha’s
mind there was never at any time the slightest
definite doubt about the child’s paternity, nor
did this side of the matter ever get beyond the
whispering stage even among the village women;
as soon as Juha and Riina had settled down in
their new home it was forgotten altogether.
Nevertheless, to Juha this first child remained a
mysterious stranger, and Riina was constantly
falling out with him over it, often for no apparent
reason whatever.

They became cottars, not on Piijola land, but
on a farm called Yrjola. At the last minute,
after the banns had already been put up, the
master gave his final answer.

“ I have no land suited to a cottar’s needs,”
he told Juha, “ and for that matter, you’re not
in a position to build a cottage just now. But
you go and speak to old man Yrjola, he’s got that
Krapsala place lying fallow, a big cabin and a nice
bit of land—you’ve only to move in. The build¬
ings are in repair and I think he’ll have you.”

THE HEART OF LIFE I 39

Pirjola was not arousing vain hopes in Juha; he
had already in all secrecy arranged the matter.

So one Sunday Juha spent several hours in
old man Yrjola’s room. Old man Yrjola champed
away in proper farmer style, coughed and went
every now and again to his pipe-shelf to refill his
pipe. He did not offer Juha a smoke. Juha’s
cheeks burned and he rubbed his perspiring palms
together. A bargain of a kind was struck. As
Juha was unable to take over all the land attached
to the croft, no contract was drawn up.

“You can stay on there my time, anyhow,
provided you live decently and do your work,”
Yrjola promised.

Until further notice Juha was to do a day’s work
a week on the farm for rent, finding his own food.

Feelings of liberation and of being inextricably
bound for life struggled for the upper hand in
Juha’s mind on his way home to Pirjola. A
hundred hands seemed to be stretching out for his
small savings. Well, he was bettering himself,
that was one comfort.

The master and Riina were in the house when
Juha returned with his news, and all three thus
found themselves together. The moment seemed
somehow to acquire a vague solemnity, which
the master lightened by announcing in an opti¬
mistic tone that he would pay for the wedding,
seeing that his maids would go and get married.

“ You, Juha, have been a faithful servant,” he

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I40

said, “ and if you keep on like that on your
own land, the Lord will bless you.” And the
master put an end to the meeting by remarking
jokingly, “As a crow flaps from one field to
another, so you, Juha and Riina, now flap from
Pirjola to Yrjola.”

A feeling of inward satisfaction was reflected
in the master’s every movement.

Soon after that the wedding was held in the
Pirjola living-room. In the excitement of that
event nearly everything that had existed so far
was drowned; all that was not drowned was
Riina’s blessed state. It obtruded itself from
hour to hour, even as the excitement was dying
down. In the yard a fight of no small dimen¬
sions developed between the uninvited, but of
this the bridegroom knew nothing; he had fallen
asleep drunk on the bed in the bakery. The
man slept, but his ears were open and through
them violin notes emerging from the hubbub
entered his dream-consciousness and kept up
there an exceptional continuous state of bliss such
as was never to visit him in waking hours, never
again even in his dreams.

Meanwhile Riina collected over thirty marks
in wedding gifts as the night wore on, twice as
much as the previous maid at Pirjola had got.
She even went out into the yard to quell the
fighters; the boldest of these followed her into

THE HEART OF LIFE 141

the house to dance and contributed many marks
to her dowry.

The croft was some distance away in the middle
of the forest attached to the Yrjola farm. It had
lain uninhabited for a long time and was so
thoroughly decayed that in ordinary conversation
no one remembered its real name. It was referred
to as Krapsala, but even a stranger could tell by
the sound of the word that that was not its real
name. Its latest occupants had been rather a
funny lot and had caused the place to be so nick¬
named. After Juha and Riina had moved in
the place began to be called, after its new occu¬
pier, Toivola. Only the master, when teasing
Juha for being late or for other omissions, would
address him as the master of Krapsala.

The young couple moved into their new home
in the week of All Saints Day. The weather and
the state of the track were well adapted to dispel
any illusions Juha may have been harbouring;
Juha got a glimpse of what was henceforward to
be his day-a-week road at its most characteristic.
The wheels of the cart sank in places to the hubs
and the horse strained with outstretched neck
and agonized glance as though afraid it was
going to sink into the earth.

The couple’s entire worldly possessions were on
the cart. There was Juha’s cupboard—his dream
during his Tuorila days—and Riina’s chest with

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142

its gaudy North Finland pattern of posies. There
was a bedstead that had lain ten years under a
store-room at Pirjola, but now displayed gleam¬
ing white bottom-boards; it had cost a silver
mark, with a sheaf of straw thrown in for a
bargain. There was a makeshift tub, a bucket
and a milkpail, an iron cauldron on feet, a stone
bowl and four wooden spoons; Juha’s household
goods thus included some things beyond what
was absolutely necessary. All this property had
been accumulated in an atmosphere of mild
excitement. In the load were also the raw
materials a cottar couple setting up on their own
would need for their daily food; these included
five pounds of pickled sprats, twenty pounds of
hard bread, a sack of potatoes and two pounds
of salt. The whole lot had been bought with
money, of which Juha had just so much left that
he was sure of being able to pay the carter.
The beginning was thus not unpromising, for
countless households have been set up in Finland
on a smaller material foundation and succeeded
remarkably well.

Nor can it be said that the couple lacked that
inward aliveness which in enterprises of this kind
is the main thing. In their voices rang a poorly
veiled challenge as they kept up a running con¬
versation with the carter. Riina, in particular,
emptied her whole stock of farm-maid witticisms
as she toiled on beside the others, her big belly

THE HEART OF LIFE 143

bouncing alarmingly as she jumped over the
worst mud-holes. And at last they saw their
destination, a group of grey board-roofed build¬
ings in the midst of a melancholy swampy wood.
They drew nearer and nearer, until at last the
cart stopped in front of an unprotected door¬
opening. And then—in with the baggage!
But now it became apparent how thoughtless
Juha had been: he had gathered fuel into stacks
in the forest, but had forgotten to bring even an
armful to the house; the carter very nearly had
to set off homeward without a drop of coffee.
Luckily there were the remains of an old fence
lying about. With some difficulty a fire was
finally lit with the aid of these. The pale day
showed by then symptoms of dusk.

After the carter had gone, the heavy stillness
of the decaying building penetrated into the
married couple’s ears with the effect of a stun¬
ning noise. Riina felt inclined to weep when
visions of her recent carefree servant days came
into her mind. So this was where the path of
her life had led her! Juha moved around, seeing
at every step a terrifying number of things to be
done. Every time he remembered their stock of
food a tremor ran through him. The food would
last so-and-so long—what then? In mid-winter
there would be little work even on the big farms.

So began the married life of the couple.

144 MEEK HERITAGE

acquiring before long all its characteristic little
features. It dyed the whole of their existence,
took visible shape in their clothes and the way
these hung on them; it showed in the permanent
expressions on their faces, in the man’s beard
and the woman’s hair, in the way they sat or
stood. Christmas had not yet come when Riina
went for the first time in Juha’s absence to the
village to barter bread for coffee. Not a day
went by without differences of opinion, and
sometimes they quarrelled; it was the substance
of their daily life, that which gave to each day
its own faint individuality, but much more a
strong rigid sameness.

On occasion Juha went to work on the farms
in the village, and when he returned with his
scanty wages in his pocket he was specially irri¬
table. He had supped at the farm where he had
been working and it was therefore not seemly to
eat a second time at home, hungry as he was.
He drank coffee and nagged at Riina for neglect¬
ing to do this or that. Riina, however, had her
blessed state to fall back on; secure in this, she
let herself go slack from the beginning, with the
result that slackness became habitual with her.
For when the child came there was plenty to do
looking after it, and by the time it was a little
older there was a second child on the way,
bringing with it the same right to take things
easy and let the housework slide.

THE HEART OF LIFE 145

For a time Life seemed to be considering what
it was going to do with this married couple. It
pondered the matter up to Christmas and then
decided to let them rise a little in the world,
seeing that they were still beginners who imagined
that their road led upward. Lumbering, which
has showered such blessings on all classes in
Finland, came once more to Juha’s aid. Forest¬
cutting began at a site three miles away, and
Juha worked there steadily for two months.
He was there when Riina, entirely alone, gave
birth to her first child, a boy who was later
christened Kalle Johannes.

When he came home that evening Juha got
such a shock that he never even gave a thought
to the early arrival of the child. Then, seeing
that there was no cause for anxiety, he recovered
from the shock, but it left behind a curious
sense of emptiness, the nature of which he never
understood. It seemed to him that something
invisible had brought him up with a jerk and
demanded to know, ‘ who are you? 5 ‘ I have a

child now as well to feed ’ came into Juha’s
mind—and again a powerful momentary agita¬
tion shook him. He thought again of money, of
which he now had a litde, but not nearly enough
for all his needs.

The flat winter day waned to a quivering
twilight and then it was night. In the Toivola
living-room lay three people who that night
x.

MEEK HERITAGE

146

instinctively drew apart from each other. Even
the child did not want to suck; every now and
again it wailed.

That February night, however, was only one
of those solitary moments when even an un¬
developed soul moves uneasily in its prison.
Life kept to its decision and let the Toivola
family climb a little way towards prosperity.
News of this good fortune filtered through at
last to old man Yrjola, to whom Juha had so
far only vaguely hinted how things were going
with him. The master heard that there was a
cow at Toivola, to be sure not Juha’s own cow,
but a borrowed one, and a horse that was all
Juha’s own, a wretched crock bought at Easter
market. About the cow the master knew already,
having given permission for it to graze in return
for an extra fifteen days of Juha’s services at the
farm, but when he mentioned the horse to Juha
he was told that grazing rights had been arranged
for it with someone else. Thinking the matter
over, however, the master began to entertain his
own suspicions, and one day when summer was
at its fairest he was seen to set off towards Toivola.
In spite of his weak chest he was going to see
how matters stood on the croft.

The master did not go straight to the house,
but turned off the track before reaching the gate
and came to the edge of the fields at a point in
the forest where he could not easily be detected

THE HEART OF LIFE I47

from the house. The panting old man cursed
with quite youthful vigour when he saw what
his crofter’s game was.

“ So that’s the way we’re getting on in the
world, stealing a tow from somebody else’s
boat!” he muttered to himself.

It was not only anger the old man felt; there
was something else in his mind that aroused a
curious combative spirit in him. He seemed to
scent a cunning attempt on Juha’s part to raise
himself on to terms of equality with him: “ So
that’s it, is it?—well, we’ll see! ”

Juha had well over an acre in crop, although
they had agreed on a much smaller patch. And
his barley seemed to be thriving wonderfully
well, although the land had lain fallow so long.
Must have been an old dunghill somewhere left
by that former tenant. But then the master’s
glance fell on Juha’s new fence, and he was
uncertain whether to laugh or curse. A new
split-wood fence stretched across the field, cut¬
ting off the sown part from the fallow. Posts,
rails and bindings from the best stand of spruce
nearby! And beyond the fence, on the old
field, a horse standing peacefully beside the
resting cow. So that was his grazing rented
from some other fellow! Invigorated by anger,
the master set off towards the yard.

In the house terror reigned. Juha’s eyes were
like two grey buttons, and Riina began a hasty

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148

attempt to tidy the room when the master was
already coming up the yard. The master noted
the alarm caused by his appearance and was
somewhat mollified. He held forth sternly never¬
theless for some time and at first let Juha and
Riina come to the conclusion that they would
have to go. He showed, meanwhile, no signs of
hurry—a favourable sign that. And at last he
sat down on the steps and began to speak in
another tone. Now that Juha had a horse and
the beginnings of a cow he might as well take
over the whole croft in return for, let us say, so-
and-so many days work for man and horse, so
many days without the horse, so many days help¬
ing with such-and-such tasks and—the master
reeled off the quantity of berries and how many
milk-pails and tubs Juha was to bring and how
much flax Riina was to spin. . . .

The day that had threatened to end so dis¬
astrously became almost a festival day. Before
leaving, the master even came into the house
and accepted a drop of coffee. And after he
had gone a still, uplifted atmosphere reigned
long in the living-room. Juha was to work his
way upward to the status of a “ big crofter,”
almost the equal of a poor farmer.

It had not entered Juha’s head to criticize the
master’s terms. Not after the shock he had had.
What he had to do now was to start on the
nearest job; he would move that fence to begin

THE HEART OF LIFE 149

with. Silly it had been of him to put it there.
The master had grounds enough for cursing
him.

Juha had become a big crofter; soon people
were addressing him as Janne.

One summer Sunday Janne—who used to be
Juha, and before that Jussi—sat in his shirt¬
sleeves in the yard, day-dreaming of a general
improvement in his circumstances. These seemed
to him to be in the nature of a disease. He
gazed on the bulging corner of the house, think¬
ing hard. In the end he had to admit to him¬
self that as long as he lived he would never
know what it was to live in a new house. His
hair was falling out, his teeth secretly crumbling.
His wife was inside the house, and his children.
There will be more and more children yet. Yes,
the house was in a bad state, but it wasn’t worth
while troubling to ask the master for timber for
a new one. And there would be the builders to
pay. Every single joint would have to be shaped
by a carpenter. One of the touchiest spots in
Janne’s hide was his ignorance of carpentry; it
was one of the basic hidden weaknesses of his
life.

But what if he were to pull down the old shanty
and try to put it up again on a smaller scale?
The master wouldn’t object to that, seeing there
would be no need to draw on the forest for new

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150

timber. At the same time it would be an im¬
provement and would help him to get on to
better terms with the master. ‘ Fll earn money
in the winter hauling paper . . . lucky I didn’t
sell the horse; the money would be gone by
now, and where should I be then? Things have
got to start going a bit better, ay, and the wife’ll
have to be taught something. All she does is
play about with the brats, and everything is
always as upside down as it can be when I come
home.’

Janne set off slowly towards the pasturage.
His dawning hopefulness made him want to see
the horse that was to haul paper for him next
winter. There it stood beside the gate, lean,
sulkily swishing its tail at the flies. It favoured
him with an evil wink, as much as to say, ‘ well,
here I am, go on with your plans.’

There is his horse and there is the house, and
in the house a family life that goes on from day
to day, through good times and bad. No stop¬
ping it, no getting rid of it. Every time a new
child comes into the world, the stream of that
life broadens, and Janne has to keep up with
it. The farm and the master and the fact that
he has not a shred of a written contract are all
part of it. A series of forces which, in spite of
their being seemingly opposed to each other,
minute by minute pulled something onward
somewhere.

THE HEART OF LIFE

151

The rye was ripening. It ought by rights to
have been cut this Sunday afternoon, for he
will have to be at the farm all, to-morrow and
the day after, but in Janne’s mind is a curious
apathy. It won’t be falling yet by Wednesday
and he can start in the morning then. Always
best to begin a job in the morning and get
properly down to it.

Half-past two in the morning. The dawn is
red on the nprth-east horizon, but it is an hour
yet to daylight. In the Toivola living-room the
wife is asleep, snoring with her mouth open, and
the children, in pairs, are also asleep; one sees
naked little buttocks and arms. Janne alone is
awake. He moves warily so as not to wake the
family. He curses in a suppressed hiss when he
holds his milk-flask to his nose. Unwashed since
he last used it, it gives forth a sickening reek.
He looks again at the sleeping woman. He had
again forgotten to tell her last night to wash it,
and without telling she would of course never
remember a thing like that. Janne smiles a
crooked weary smile and goes to fill his flask.
The funnel is missing, and how is he to fill a
flask from a pail without a funnel! He is out of
the living-room now and can swear freely. Using
a soiled coffee-cup he laboriously fills the flask.

Next, bread into his knapsack. Against his
will Janne is compelled to admit that the store

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152

of bread has shrunk too quickly; some of the
loaves have walked off without waiting to be
eaten. Everything slips through his fingers; his
angry protests might just as well have never been
made for all the effect they have. There she
snores in the house with her brats and here am
I off to the reaping for the master. Where’s my
sickle now—wants grinding of course—have to
grind it at the farm. As he crosses the yard
Janne sees the funnel on the ground where the
children usually play; but that is the last of
his trials this morning in his own home. He
strides along the morning-damp track, finding
satisfaction in the thought that the tool he has
to carry is no heavier this time. From this
distance his feelings towards the house he has
just left are almost friendly. His day-dreams
begin; always on these early morning walks to
the farm pleasant ideas come into his head.

Work begins at four and his walk takes an
hour. To-day he has to bestir himself a little
because his sickle needs sharpening. It turns
out, however, that the master, on an important
day like this, has rung the bell a quarter of an
hour earlier than usual, and when Janne arrives
the men are already off to work. The master
stands in the yard, a treacly smile on his face.

“ The master of Krapsala likes to sleep, I see,
with his wife on the hem of his shirt. That’s
why he’s never in time.”

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153

The master says his say, coughs and turns
aside. Janne takes his food-bag to the porch
and hurries after the others; his sickle is still
unsharpened and he tries to give it a rub with a
whetstone as he walks.

Abuses were undoubtedly rife in the crofter
system as practised in Finland in those days.
Janne, to be sure, does not yet know the mean¬
ing of the word abuse; he merely toils and
grouses. On this very day he had scarcely
worked five hours before it came on to rain,
and rained hard enough for the master to say,
“ We’ll have to stop reaping now. Come to¬
morrow if it’s fine.”

Unwillingly the crofters and other day-
labourers took their food-bags and slouched off
in the rain, each to his own home, to quarrel
viciously the rest of the day with their wives
and children. And lo! the next day was fine.
Again the same long tramp with milk-flask,
food-bag and sickle—and four hours’ reaping,
after which the rain came down and the same
walk home along slippery roads was before the
men. A working-day meant fifteen hours at
that time, and in two days the men had thus
done nine. Towards the end of the week the
weather turned really fine and the crofters’ own
rye began to fall while the men worked on the
farm. Sunday had to be devoted to their own
crops. Those who had planned to attend Com-

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154

munion Service had to put off their church¬
going to the autumn, annoying as it was when
one thought what the roads would be like then.

What the roads really were like one found out
when the time came round for the autumn
ploughing. On those occasions Janne need not
get up earlier than three, but it was a job to
find his brown horse in the dark; a white horse
would have been better. For when the brown
horse happened to stand quite still, so that not
the faintest clank came from its bell, the only
guide to where it was standing was to listen for
its sigh. Then there was the bad road before
him, with the wheels sinking in to their hubs.
On the cart was the plough, a pair of shafts and
food. It was a troublesome load, always tend¬
ing in the worst parts of the road to slide off
the cart.

A ploughing-day was the hardest kind of work
especially for the horse. The master was in the
fields most of the time; he had learned by ex¬
perience during the course of time that a crofter’s
hanging sheath-knife didn’t swing very often
when the master was away. And the example
set by the crofters made the farm-hands take
things easy as well. The master walked about
the fields stick in hand, coughing in the damp
air. He watched Janne Toivola cursing and
yelling as he jerked at the bit of his horse. But
he suspected that the fury was mostly acting,

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155

and when the horse, panting and stretching its
lips, next stopped, he gave it a sounding thwack
with his stick. And the horse moved all right.
The longer the day wore on the oftener the
master had to brandish his stick at it, and even
then when evening came it was a good bit
behind the master’s own horses. Trying, these
crofter-days, especially the man-and-horse days,
to master and men alike.

A few of the crofters tried to save all that early
morning bother by coming to the farm with
everything they needed the evening before. But
that was no use to Janne. He had tried it once
when he had to be at the farm at two in the
morning for the flax-braking, but he had not
slept a wink, and at half past twelve he got up
in a rage, moved the hands of the clock forward
to two and then woke up the other men. Even
the strongest strive vainly against the laws of
nature, and in Janne’s case nature seemed to
have decreed that he was not to fall asleep except
in his own home with Riina beside him. In
spite of all the friction of married life, the nag¬
ging and squabbling, one thing still happened
every night: before going to sleep Janne laid his
arm round Riina’s neck. He laid it there and
patted her a few times on the shoulder, gave her
a squeeze and patted her again—there, there!
Astoundingly he did that, and then went to
sleep. And so he never went a second time to

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156

the farm for the night, but preferred even on
flax-days to get up at one, take the heavy flax-
brake on his shoulder and in pitch darkness
struggle along the muddy track.

Flax-days were among the most exhausting of
the days he had to labour for the master. Nearly
always a competition would spring up to see who
could brake most flax, and that went on from two
in the morning to daylight; a dram of spirits
was the only refreshment one got all that time.
Then came breakfast, and after that the men
went into the forest to gather stakes until it was
too dark to sec.

That was how people worked in Finland dur¬
ing those happiest decades in the nation’s history
when the march of material and spiritual pro¬
gress was at its fastest even among this lowly
people, who feared God and sincerely loved
their great and kind ruler.

Janne Toivola carried out his plan to earn
money in the winter by freighting paper. He
earned money; coming home from a two-days’
journey he might have more than ten marks in
his bag. Paper had not yielded the whole of
that sum; part of it came from the sale of
butter. But the money had one curious property:
you never knew where it went. Hard to say
whether the family were any better off than
before. But the drawbacks attendant on freight-

THE HEART OF LIFE 157

ing were obvious enough, although Janne tried
not to see them. The horse grew thin and lazy,
so that whenever he had to put in a day’s work
on the farm, the master’s stick played on its ribs
whatever the nature of the work. The manure
tended to get left in the cow-house, and the cow
had to be dried with straw, no one having had
time to cut spruce twigs.

That was how it worked out, but the prospect
of another ten marks sent Janne on ever new
freighting trips. Ever frequenter became those
early risings when Janne went off to Tampere,
and late nights when he returned. Someone
invented a new nickname, Paper-Janne, for him
after his horse had been seen nearly twice a week
over a long period outside the Kuuskoski paper
warehouse. And when anything happened to
be needed round about where Janne lived, the
usual remark came to be, “ We’ll have to go to
Toivola. Janne’ll fetch it from Tampere next
time he goes.”

But then came a fateful freighting trip.

Janne had bought two and a half litres of
spirits in town, and the half-litre was for himself.
The weather was cold, his feet and hands were
freezing, the horse was white with rime. Half¬
way home Janne took his first drink, and from
then onward the proverb about giving the Devil
an inch came true. Janne was well drunk by
the time he reached his own neighbourhood and

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158

dropped in at the house where he was to leave
the two litres. Seeing that Janne had started
his spree, the others joined him, and Janne was
in no hurry, lie stayed at his neighbour’s until
close upon midnight, quarrelling occasionally
and making friends again. But during one
quarrel the woman of the house taunted Janne
with Riina’s secret sales of bread. Janne had of
course had his own suspicions about this, but
now he felt deeply insulted and at a loss how to
crush his sharp-tongued hostess he was casting
about him for a suitable retort when he saw his
neighbour’s watch hanging on the window-frame
and arrogantly offered to buy it. The neighbour
was willing enough, provided they could agree
about the price, and eventually a bargain was
struck and Janne left the house with the watch
and little more than a mark in his pocket. But
within him raged the spirit of old Penjami Nikkila.

Grunting to himself he drove into the yard,
unharnessed the horse and then—then went into
the house. The family slept. Janne lit the
lamp and spoke in a low, but menacing voice. ^
“ So that’s what we’re doing here—sleeping! ”
He took off his coat—no one woke up. He
took off his waistcoast and struck the floor with
it with all his might.

“ Up, you rascals! ” he bellowed.

Riina, Kalle and Hiltu bounced up as though
something had hit them, and they were near to

THE HEART OF LIFE I59

being hit, for Janne had seized a billet of wood
from the fireplace and was running round the
room shouting and cursing. Only half-dressed,
the wife and children sought refuge in the wintry
night. Such a scene had never occurred in the
family before.

Janne raved in the living-room, alone. But
not altogether alone; in the bed, moveless, lay
little Ville, usually the liveliest of them all.
There is something strange in the fact that he
does not move; Janne goes nearer, his intoxi¬
cation evaporating. The boy screams, but does
not move.

“ Did I hurt you just now? ”

No answer, only a trembling look.

Janne feels unhappy and bewildered; he
stares around him and sees his waistcoat and
fragments of the watch on the floor. He stoops
down to look: yes, the watch is in bits. Janne
remembers everything and collapses. He has
been hauling paper to Tampere and this is his
homecoming.

His rage vanished and gave way to a stupid
numbness. Riina and the children stole into
the room, stiff with cold and weeping. Kalle
looked more scared than the others. But the
father took no notice of him; he sat quite still,
staring fixedly before him. Then he fell into a
doze, but managed to get to bed unaided and
was soon asleep.

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160

What a time! Riina heaved a trembling,
tearful sigh. Janne is still ignorant of what has
taken place while he was away; there was
something else behind his outburst. Riina pulled
on her frock and went out to see what had
become of the horse and sleigh. On her way
out she caught Kalle’s furtive eye. It was Kalle
who had hit Villc on the back with a rail yester¬
day and probably crippled the child. A wave
of disgust and pain surged through Riina’s
bosom; clearer than ever before she had caught,
a moment ago, a glimpse of Kalle’s father, his
real father, in the boy’s face. A dull bitterness,
wholly lacking in any redeeming element, gnawed
at Riina’s heart.

Life went on, but again on a new plane. The
next morning Janne ought to have been at the
farm with his horse. But the horse was unfit
for work, and his own state was not much better.
The work-day went to swell Janne’s arrears.
Janne drove manure from the byre into the yard,
for by now the cow’s back almost reached the
ceiling. No manure had been carted into the
field this year because of the freighting trips.
And the net yield from Janne’s freighting was
now a little more than a mark in cash—and bits
of a watch on the living-room floor. And Ville
was in bed with an injured spine.

The day was miserable beyond words. The

THE HEART OF LIFE l6l

unhappy parents could not even scold one
another, each having his own load of guilt.
Kalle’s life, however, was henceforward made so
unbearable that Riina secretly found employment
for him at the far side of the village. And that
was the last of Kalle at home. Hiltu, a pale
silent girl, was thereafter the oldest child. But
Riina was with child again, and soon there was
a second girl, Lempi. Then came a boy, Martti.
More and more children.

In circumstances like those of Janne and
Riina matters rarely come to a decisive crisis as
in better situated families. All that happens is
a series of small jerks which jolt the course of
life as it were from one step to another. After
each successive jerk no one troubles to dwell
much on what has happened: one submits to
life on the new plane. For after all, life is life
in all its forms, and the only absolute in relation
to it is that it has to be lived.

Ville at first recovered to some extent from his
injury. He moved his limbs, ate and slept.
But then his spine began to ache again and
finally to fester. By that time the agitating
events of the period when Ville received his
injury had long ago been forgotten. The family
merely existed in a general atmosphere of decay.
Out of sheer apathy thoughtless acts were com¬
mitted such as the sale of the horse.

So the years went on and grew into decades.

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l62

The curve of Julia Toivola’s life—the reversion
to the name Julia marked a public recognition
of his decline to his former status—curved gently
downward; the slightly firmer attitude towards
life of his middle years had relaxed. Viewing
his present existence with a strictly neutral eye
one seems already to divine in it that atmosphere
of a long-clrawn deep sigh which precedes a well-
earned slumber. But while one’s limbs ache,
sleep refuses to come; one may heave many
such sighs before one’s head finally droops to
earth. There is time for one to grow bitter and
calm down again more than once before the
great liberating sleep descends on one.

Juha sold his horse and the money was soon
spent. The last of it went to the chemist’s for
Ville’s medicines, a few copper coins change was
all that remained. Weeks of man-and-horse
days were in arrears, and for that matter Juha
had so far only done twelve other work-days,
and half the summer gone. Juha tried to get
the master to believe that he had not yet suc¬
ceeded in finding a horse to his liking. The
master listened without remark.

Old Yrjola had died. The present master was
his son Taavetti, who had been to a Farmer’s
School. He is known to have said that the old
man’s agreements are not binding on him; he
is not bound to recognize them unless he likes.
The farm is his by purchase from the other heirs

THE HEART OF LIFE 163

and he saw no clauses about crofts in the deeds.
That was when he first became master; never¬
theless, up to now he has “ recognized ” all of
his crofters as such.

But what is going to happen to old Toivola
with all those arrears of work?

The day is a windless Sunday, the time three
o’clock in the afternoon. Juha Toivola sits on
the threshold of his house in his shirt-sleeves,
bare-headed and unshod. Outwardly he feels
warm and comfortable, and matters are nearly
as well with him inwardly. He can’t always be
dwelling on how he is going to get a horse, and
he cannot yet prevail on himself to admit that
it is practically certain he will never again have
a horse of his own. Life is at a standstill, as
before a change of wind. A meekly-mild old
man’s state of mind not far removed from tears.

Through the open door Ville can be heard
moaning at intervals. Riina asks him whether
he wants a drink. Something to moisten his
lips, that is all that can be done for him. It is
long since he last ate any food. The medicines
gave out some time ago. They were useless, but
now that the end is drawing near it would be a
relief to have something to give the child. Sad
that there is no medicine in the house. One
can only moisten the boy’s lips, a service he
accepts humbly each time.

The longer Juha sits there, the more frequent

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164

grow the moans and the offers of a drink. No
recollection of the cause of this misery—Kalle,
now out in the world—ever enters Juha’s mind,
even by accident. At the moment Juha is not
even angry with Riina. Riina is slack, but she
bears this cross without complaint.

A softened grief induces a curious state of
harmony in Juha’s thoughts. The languid per¬
fection of the day takes on something of the
same colour as these thoughts, and when he
now thinks of horses, he does so dispassionately.
Villc’s moaning takes on the form of a benedic¬
tion on this particular problem; it is as though
Ville were begging for a horse. Ville’s sufferings
seem somehow to justify his claim to a horse.

Juha rises to his feet. He has no intention of
doing anything about the horse; he just pulls on
his boots and coat and sets off for a walk. Never¬
theless he keeps a steady course towards the
village and at last admits to himself that he is
on his way to Pirjola. He will decide when he
gets there whether to take up the subject with
his former master or not. He might run across
the master somewhere outside and so be able to
chat naturally about other things should he feel
shy about mentioning the horse.

The old master of Pirjola does happen to be in
his tobacco patch, and they talk quite comfort¬
ably about one thing and another. The old

THE HEART OF LIFE 165

man even asks in a gentle voice how the boy is
getting on—not at peace yet? No, not yet.

“ Ah, there’s a child who’s being tried longer
than most.”

The old man goes in, saying, “ Won’t you
come in for a smoke? ”

“ I don’t think I will, I’ve got to be going a
bit farther,” answers Juha, swallowing hard.

And he walks on, having decided nothing.
His body with all its five senses moves along the
twisting road, but his mind takes no part in this
forward movement. And so, that Sunday even¬
ing, he finds himself entering a house more alien
to him than any other house in the parish could
be. He enters the new house at Nikki] a. And
once he is under an alien roof he has to tell his
story, or the people, finding him errandless,
might think he had gone mad. He explains his
plight to Anttoo Ollila, now a middle-aged man.
And Anttoo, on his part, does not appear to be
disagreeably moved. Anttoo’s voice, when he
speaks, is as strident as though he were shouting
to the stable-hand to tell him which set of
harness to take. Juha tells in his heartiest tone
the story of Ville’s sufferings; he describes the
high cost of medicines and his other troubles.
Finally Anttoo says:

“To speak out straight, I know quite exactly
that I’d never see a penny of my money again,

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166

and I’m not the man to throw my money down
a well.”

He moves youthfully about the room as though
looking for something, and then goes out. Juha,
too, gels up and leaves and is not in the least
downcast. But he no longer has the courage to
go through the kitchen. He sidles out through
the big porch, whose many small window-panes
set up an angry tinkle when he opens the door.
When he has crossed the yard and reached the
road, he feels free and safe again. What a long
walk he seems to be taking this evening. The
air has cooled and become suffused with a faint
glow after the long, happy day.

The car is on the corn in the villages, and
when he is in the woods again, the grass-tufted
ground smells moist. On such a ramble even
the most miserable human being cannot keep his
thoughts fixed wholly on everyday matters.
Juha docs not think of the coming week’s labours;
he even forgets to think about the horse. Around
him hovers the glamorous mood of a calm summer
night, in which tiny memories of remote inci¬
dents on the path of his life seem to be embedded.
An unnatural presentiment of happiness casts its
deceptive spell over him. At home, sleep reigns
in the living-room; Ville, too, has found rest on
his ragged couch. Riina half wakes up when
Juha stretches himself out beside her, but falls

THE HEART OF LIFE 167

asleep again at once; she has to make the best
of the hours when Ville is asleep.

Blessed be the Finnish summer night. After
nature has thoroughly subdued a man by turn¬
ing on him her weekday aspect for decades,
prodded and jerked him along the bewildering
uphill and downhill path of his life, she will on
some summer night withdraw from his ageing
consciousness her day-time goads and let it sink
into the moist peace of her dreaming landscape.

The visit to Nikkila had only served to swell
Julia’s curious mood. Nothing would have been
harder for him just now than to let his thoughts
dwell on work and new efforts. Happiness was
on the way along some other path, not through
them. Ville breathed audibly in his bed; Juha
did not hope that he would die, yet he did not
believe the boy would get well; it was not
that. ... For hours Juha was unable to sleep;
he did not even try. And at last his thoughts
took a definite direction. He would not go a
second time to Pirjola, nor to Nikkila; he would
go to Tuorila, on the far side of Tampere. Why,
he had relatives there. He did not think in
terms of the price of a horse or anything as
clear-cut as that, but simply that he now had
to go there—this summer. After his mind had
made this discovery, it grew calm. He got up
from the bed and in his shirt went to the door-

i68

MEEK HERITAGE

way, but soon came back as though afraid the
night sky might tamper with his ripened decision.
Then he slept.

But in the morning, when he awoke, he
actually set off on his long journey. He described
life at Tuorila to Riina and hinted mysteriously
that he would not return empty-handed from his
visit. Riina muttered something about work¬
days, the sick child and other such matters, but
finally relapsed into indifference and Juha was
able to embark on his sleep-walker’s expedition,
from which he did not wake until he was at
Tuorila.

It was a strange prelude to the new phase
through which long-suffering Juha was still to
pass.

Juha’s uncle K. Tuorila had died a highly-
respected farmer and left behind him on the
farm a spirit of enlightened progress with which
the visit of nondescript Juha was wholly incom¬
patible. The estate was being administered by
the heirs. The young master soon recognized
Juha and carried him off from the kitchen to the
parlour by way of the main entrance. Just at
that moment the telephone rang in the hall, an
instrument Juha had never seen before at such
close quarters. A sturdy young gentleman, the
master’s brother, came to answer the call. He
spoke Finnish sure enough, but Juha understood

THE HEART OF LIFE 169

nothing of what he was saying, although he
overheard every word, the door being open.
“. . . folk-poems . . . Vepses. . . .”

“Tell him to drop in here,” shouted the
master from the parlour.

Juha found himself most of the time in the
company of that same young gentleman, who
was very friendly. Only he would go on pressing
Juha for folk-poems, whatever they were. “ Folk-
story ” he dimly understood and was sorely
worried because for the life of him he couldn’t
think of a good yarn, damned if he could.
Instead he let his tongue glide over to his
domestic circumstances, and the young gentie-
man listened, saying every now and again, “ Is
that so? ” Finally he gave Juha ten marks and
led him to the room where a bed had been made
for him. He then went away with a “ Good¬
night.”

“ The same hope here,” answered Juha.

Juha was left alone in the room, in staggeringly
fresh air and a tremendous clean smell. Against
the background of this cleanness Juha’s journey
began to take on the complexion of a fantastic
affair in the planning of which he had had no
part. Juha inspected the curious system of
sheets in which he was to lie. The sheets were
of thin, remarkably white linen, and there were
two of them, the top one unaccountably en¬
tangled with the blanket. Juha disengaged it

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170

and spread it under him, remembered the ten
marks he had been given and stretched himself
out on the bed.

From somewhere very far away he seemed to
hear Ville’s moaning, so clearly that it was only
after a moment or two that he realized how
impossible the idea was. A sudden woeful
longing swept over him. His mind awoke from
its long delusion, but his weary body fell asleep
in the midst of an overwhelming cleanness.

V

DEATH DOES ITS BEST

The August day is long and sultry. The true
nature of such a day is best apprehended on a
fifteen-mile heath that lies between two parishes
and is pierced by a winding road known since
time immemorial as the North Road.

On this road generation after generation of
solitary travellers have felt the terror of the
wilderness stir faintly in their blood; driving
home from town in their carts, with befogged
glance turned inwards, they have, as one long
mile succeeded another, gazed critically at their
own childish fundamental selves stripped naked
by alcohol, reviewed their past and planned
their future, and ultimately, as the first village
ram p into view, roared their relief. In the middle
stretches of the heath even the smallest rises have
names well known three parishes away, so often
have they enabled travellers to estimate the
distance they have covered, so often, driving up
them at a walk, have men paused in their thoughts
to wonder how matters are at home and grown
secretly humble under the weight of the great
unknown. On each side of the road spreads a
pine forest of unchanging height and appearance,

171

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172

somehow, it is hard to imagine that anyone owns
these forests. No birds sing in them, no hares
start up. At one spot someone has attempted a
tiny holding and may possibly have lived there,
but not for long. The boards nailed over the
windows arc grey with age.

Only gad flics escort the traveller from parish
to parish in the summer, whirling round the
heated horse the whole way.

Noon has come. At a certain point on the
heath road Juha Toivola sits at the wayside,
overcome by the heat. He has been to Tuorila;
to-day is the third day since he left there, and he
is no farther than this. He has made slow pro¬
gress. He spent one night at Tampere in the
waiting-room of one of the shop-keepers; he
bought a loaf in the market-place in the morning
and has eaten that. He also bought half a kilo
of coffee and the same quantity of sugar, and in
his bag he still has eight marks, a five-penni coin
and three pennis. He still has that much left of
the money given him at Tuorila. The problem
of how best to spend it weighs on his mind. A
drink would have tasted fine, but he lacked the
courage to walk into the shop where they sold
spirits. Those marks were the fruit of his high
quest and therefore trebly valuable. They
burned and stung him. At home a score of
matters awaited him for which the money ought

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 173

to be used; for most of them it wasn’t enough.
It wouldn’t buy him a horse, for that matter—a
horse—hm. That train of thought always ended
now in a bitter smile.

In the deep silence of the heath Juha gave free
rein to his dejection. No need here to snap at
anybody and pretend to have mysterious plans.
He is drawing near to his own parish after a long
journey—the day after to-morrow it will be a full
week since he set out—and the mood of such
homecomings is always vaguely melancholy,
whatever kind of a failure the journey may have
been. Especially if the journey has been a fiasco
does an old man feel inclined to tears when he
approaches his familiar, wretched home. And
Juha Toivola is an old man. He senses that this
journey, the longest he has undertaken for
decades, has been as it were a treacherous
threshold on the other side of which the step is
so deep that taking it one comes down with an
unpleasant jar. It has jarred Juha into old age.
He feels that as he sits by the wayside on his
return from the place where, his childhood at
an end, he saw his mother die.

Old age has come to him, and one of its allies,
the demon of self-examination, now for the first
time really holds defenceless Juha in its iron
claws. The five-days’ journey is like an epitome
of the strivings and aims of his whole life; it
seems to move away from him to a distance to

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174

allow him to sec it clearly, and to it lead all the
thousands and thousands of little circumstances
in his life that at bottom were none of them
really favourable. There are so many of them
that when, as at this moment, they all try to
enter his mind together, his body instinctively
recoils and would fain be on the move again, as
so often before. But on this occasion the demon
is stubborn. c You arc tired, the day is hot, and
at home awaits you, you know what; so sit
where you are, visitor of relatives.’

Remembering the childish hopefulness of his
departure, Juha spat. Another work-day in
arrears for this week; how many are there already
in arrears? His man-and-horse days are in
arrears since the spring; c I sold the horse, yes,
I really did that.’ And only now does the truth
penetrate crashingly right to the bottom of his
mind, that he will never have another horse. All
that is left of the price of the horse are the three
copper pennis at the bottom of his bag.

In direct sequence come new thoughts of grow¬
ing bitterness: £ Riina—I married her that time
—the very same woman—I have lived with her
all these years and slept my nights beside her....’
The idea of Riina surges into Juha’s consciousness
like a brand-new tremendous truth ... he sees
all Riina’s ugly traits as a stupendous irreparable
fact to which he has unaccountably become fet¬
tered. Riina does not depend on him, nor he

DEATH DOES ITS BEST I75

on Riina; side by side they hang on to life.
Along invisible channels, as the years have
passed, they have unawares sucked into them¬
selves the sour substance of the other; when
they quarrel, it is with themselves they quarrel.
Every summer they go together to Holy Com¬
munion; they cannot sleep except under the
same coverlet, with no words left to exchange,
coughing, turning and sighing.

In Juha’s withered brain the natural phe¬
nomenon, the process known as the formation
of a philosophy of life, dimly emerges. The
thin, bald-headed fellow could easier, much
easier, learn to fly than to understand those
words and their connotations; yet at the given
time the actual process takes place inside him as
autumn leaves drop from a tree though the tree
knows nothing of the botanical process involved.
Juha believes that he sees clearly now what life
is. It is like some sour, silly substance of which
every human being was given more than he
could handle, so that he was always in a state
of semi-exhaustion, always on the point of being
suffocated by it; it was like being put to work
in an enormous hayloft with dozens of carts
bringing in hay at a gallop. Until at last one
died. . . .

The thought of death sent Juha bounding up
from the roadside and set him moving home¬
ward at a good pace. He is an old man, fifty

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176

years old; in what manner and when will he
die ? He cannot accept the idea of a breakdown
in all the multitudinous combinations formed by
him and his family and all the great and small
circumstances appertaining thereto since—when?
—the beginning of things, so all-embracing they
arc. Why, the combinations are identical with
the world. Other people, those who live and
die around him, they are but circumstances
belonging to the combinations. ‘ And yet I
must die. What is a last moment like? ’ God?
Ah, there was the gap where God came in.

‘ Now I understand God. He will see to it that
my death passes off smoothly; He will somehow
so square up things that this incomprehensible,
stupid, great and essential world or life will not
break up when I die.’

Impossible to interpret the primitive move¬
ments of Juha’s mind in words. He is returning
alone from his foolish visit, so utterly incom¬
prehensible to the owners of Tuorila—from a
journey at whose goal the wings of his secret
canny purpose were scorched to nothingness.
And as he walks on, alone with his thoughts, he
is stubbornly aware of being at the centre of the
life he now understands, as he is always at the
centre of the bowl of sky above him. He is
alone, and the world is around him; the day
is curiously like a mixture of Sunday and weekday
when, dead-beat and hopeless, he finds himself

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 177

plodding at last through familiar scenes. His
very home wears a new aspect, as though it too
had been thinking things over while he was
away. Perhaps there is a little bread left in the
house; anyway, one can get quite a lot of bread
for eight marks. Home at last. Queerly strange
it seems.

One last exertion, and Juha ascends the two
steps to the porch, passes through the ante¬
room, opens the door and feels the familiar smell
of rotting wood in his nostrils. Riina is seated
on the back bench working at a strange white
cloth and makes no remark—greetings are not a
habit between members of the family. There is
no sign of Ville.

The unfamiliar aspect of the room helps to
strengthen an impression that began already in
the yard. Ville has died while he was away.
Juha hangs his dogskin knapsack on its nail
beside the door. Which of us two is going to
speak first? The children too are silent. After
many questions, which seem to hide under their
surface a nervous irritation, the talk begins to
draw nearer to the crucial point, and then the
questioning is left entirely to Juha.

Juha has taken off his boots and coat and sits
on the porch-steps as the evening grows cooler.
The sensation of mingled weekday and Sunday
persists, but his dawning philosophy of life has
been dealt a blow and is tottering. Ville’s death

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178

is so groat a relief that for the time being he is
unable fully to grasp its extent. Can that sour
silly material of life be beginning to thin out and
grow sweeter in his case, so much so that he may
still hope to emerge from it, as from a sea, to
breathe ?

The visit to Tuorila began to take on a new
colour, 'fen marks in six days is not so bad,
and the discomfiture seems a long way back seen
from this distance. The boy will have to be
buried—but what then ? Ah, there is still plenty
of the old smart in life; it hasn’t improved its
ways very much.

In any case death had achieved so much that
Juha, as he sat on the steps, was a little refreshed.
One could hear that from the lusty way in which
he bawled at the smaller children playing in
the yard.

The year wore slowly on towards autumn. In
the summery landscape autumn stole already
into the lush greenery of the boggy woods and the
melancholy fields of winter rye. One could still
work in one’s shirt-sleeves, and through the rents
in a shirt even an old skin still glowed golden
brown. The shaft of a rake felt warm to a
sinewy hand and a warm scent rose from the
hillside hay heaped beside the house wall. The
scent of freshly gathered twigs was cooler. The
sturdy nature of the interior cloaks the tiny

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 179

miseries of the human nest hiding in its midst
in warmth, light and perfume and prevents its
odours from becoming too obtrusive. Yet not
for a moment does it lose its under-current of
melancholy. Up to Midsummer its aspect as it
reaches out right to the walls of the dwelling
inspires hopes, but before these hopes have had
time to materialize a look of memory has crept
into it. In August, noontide still has an at¬
mosphere of sated richness, but in its light, as it
falls on the neck of a crofter’s child, on her scanty
brown pigtail, the tinge of melancholy is too
obvious to be ignored.

Around a forest cabin life in summer follows
the same phases as in the open mid-parish spaces.
Only here the intensive ploughings, seedings and
reapings of the wide lands are as distant, thin
echoes. It is the lot, however, of mankind,
however weak the individual, eternally to strive.
And even the least energetic is not altogether
absolved from this duty. As a heavy working
season progresses he grows wearier and wearier
each evening, and as the years pass his weariness
increases summer by summer.

A death is a refreshing event. After Ville’s
death life at Toivola was for long half in the
nature of a festival. In the midst of the hardest
toil it was as though Juha had to be continually
looking back at the years and decades behind
—and the past, no matter what it was like, always

l 80 MEEK HERITAGE

has a faint halo of sanctity. Juha seemed to be
more morose because he spoke less. The hair
that still fringed his neck seemed to bristle more
and more, and in his little eyes was a strange
brittle, stern look. He tried once again to work
regularly on the farm. The master let him work
and gave up harassing him about the man-and-
horse days. And now, when the men rested in
the yard after dinner and the debate on any
subject grew heated, old Toivola would draw
forth God and hold a long lecture in which his
view of life as something “ sour ” was revealed,
but in such ranting, accusing accents that the
effect on the master and the other men was
chilling. Easy to see that Juha Toivola had
aged; he had changed a lot that summer.

But it was only the still atmosphere of some¬
thing solemn persisting in Juha’s mind. He had
a deep inward conviction that the death in the
family had increased his worth, not in the eyes of
other men, but in his own eyes and in a way
perhaps those of God. He, too, was now one
of those who are as it were on better terms with
God than most, as one among a crowd of work¬
men may be with the boss and thus have no need
to do lip-service or try to curry favour. The
great majority of those empty-headed ordinary
men had never thought of God except as a name,
and for that reason it was right, when occasion
arose, to speak out sternly.

DEATH DOES ITS BEST l8l

When Juha now returns homeward along the
familiar fence-side track this late summer, there
are no irritating plans fermenting in his head,
and he feels no chagrin at the failure of earlier
plans. Life since his return home from Tuorila
has been as it were at a pause, a kind of quiet
expectation. To be sure, Ville is already dead,
but Juha is clearly aware that his life is still
seeking a new direction. There is indeed much
to be decided one way or another; something
will have to be done about the croft now that he
has no horse. Only his thoughts are queerly
loth to dwell on that problem. He is grateful
to the master each time the subject is allowed to
lie. It is as though something else had first to
be arranged; but what that something is his
mind cannot resolve. He marks time, waiting,
from day to day.

Weariness has been a common experience at
Toivola for years. Riina was born slack and
weak-willed, and a diet of salt water, potatoes
and sour milk had done nothing to steel her
character in her mature years. Sitting with a
child in her lap she often pondered the nature of
the foolish urge that drives a servant to get
married, trying in all seriousness to glimpse her
motives and catch the moods of those far-off days.

The supreme enchantment of a servant’s life
is that when you do lie down to sleep there is no
need for you to think about what has to be done

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l82

on the morrow or what has been left undone
to-day. Such questions do not exist for a
servant, but for a crofter’s wife they are a
standing trial. But when it comes to children
a wife lias the better of it. Giving birth to a
child is as such what it is, but in a servant’s case
it means the revelation of her wicked ways,
whereas for a wife it is simply part of the general
greyness of life, something an outsider views
almost with sympathy. And as in that particular
respect greyness is and will for ever remain a
woman’s lot, no wonder a servant too tries to
get married. A mistress’s tongue may perhaps
help to spur her on—she wants to feel free—but
whenever Riina thought of that aspect of the
matter she smiled sourly, remembering the un¬
fettered days of her servanthood. It was pleasant
to dwell in memory on those days when the old
man was away, while waiting for the coffee-pot
to boil.

Riina was tired. After her last child-birth
something had gone wrong with her, she had
developed some feminine complaint that she was
ashamed to mention even to other women, let
alone Juha. This summer it had become much
worse; it wearied and crushed her and often
made her feel giddy when she had to pitch hay.
The fact that she had to keep it secret gave rise
to all sorts of complications. She had to get
Juha to sleep by himself. She put the matter to

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 183

Juha as something she had made up her mind
about, crossly and with no further explanation.
The husband stared at her and submitted, draw¬
ing his own conclusions; the old fellow had
himself changed a lot of late.

Harder to bear was the lassitude and a slow
ebbing of her strength. She was forced now to
leave many essential tasks undone. Ever more
frequent became the desire, when Juha was
away, to cast herself down on the bed and rest
there a while. Hiltu was a very good child
indeed at trying, almost as though she had other
blood in her veins, but she didn’t seem able to
get through with the work for all that she was
already Confirmed. And you couldn’t always
be scolding her, a girl like an angel’s shadow and
not very strong. She had never had to be
whipped for naughtiness; if you so much as
threatened her she would break into a heart¬
rending fit of crying, although at her age many
girls were running on the sly after boys. Hiltu
was so delicate and so unsuited to her sur¬
roundings that Riina would scarcely have shed
a tear if she had died. Often Riina was loth to
put the child to work; in spite of her illness she
did it herself or put it off for another day.

The summer’s tasks have to be done in their
proper season. They force even the weary to
make an effort. Juha strove, and Riina too did
what she could. Juha also tried to put in more

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184

work on the farm, lest the thought of evicting
him should occur once too often to the master.
At home he over-strained himself bringing in the
grain from the field in a hand-cart and found
himself with a shameful rupture that had at all
costs to be kept a secret. Life was hard. The
summers with their heavy tasks were like a suc¬
cession of long journeys you were compelled to
undertake however tired you might still be after
the last stretch. You could not see the end of
the journey, nor do you care to spy ahead too
often, for there lies death. And nothing else.

One Saturday evening the steam-bath seemed
to be sweeter to the body than usual. Sweet it
was and there was plenty of steam. But there
must have been other deadly fumes hidden in
the steam, for when Riina returned from the
bath-house she had to take to her bed; it was as
much as she could do to put on her shift. She
lay speechless in bed, panting for breath, and in
the morning she was unable to rise. Riina
Toivola was thus really ill. And the next day
one might have overheard the following con¬
versation at the crofters’ end of the village.

“ Riina Toivola’s ill, I hear.”

“ You don’t say—since when? ”

“ Well she had her bath on Saturday night
and got such a pain there that she had a job
getting back to the house. Juha was at our
place to-day asking for drops.”

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 185

“ Did he get anything? ”

“ I’d got some castor oil and heart drops, but
you know nothing seems to help against pains in
your inside.”

The talk then passed to all the different kinds
of pains different women in the village had had
at various times.

Riina’s pain grew steadily worse, and an
additional trouble was the delicate nature of her
complaint—the countrywoman’s ingrained feeling
that an illness of this kind was filthy and shameful.
Of course, before long it came to the knowledge
of the other members of the family. Juha knew
now why Riina had made him move to a separate
bed. Hiltu, too, found out what ailed her
mother, yet uppermost in her mind was the
memory of the bath night that had made mother
take to her bed. It was from that night she
counted the weeks and days mother’s pain had
lasted and tried to calculate how soon mother
could be expected to be well again. None of the
children had as yet suspected that mother might
die. For the younger children—two-year old
Martti, and Lempi, now going on for four—
mother’s illness meant the same slightly solemn
excitement that Ville’s death had brought;
Martti possibly felt nothing at all. They were
mostly outside in the day-time, and at night
Riina’s moans failed to wake them.

Juha saw in Riina’s illness a sign of something

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186

to come. On his trips to the village he would
hold forth at length to a few chosen hearers;
at home he bustled about in a matter-of-fact way.
After bringing home all the “ drops ” his
acquaintances happened to possess and finding
that none of them helped, he began to plan a
visit to the apothecary. The cow gave so much
milk that by careful stinting he got together four
pounds of butter for a friend to sell in town.
The money was insufficient to pay for the medi¬
cines, but the apothecary, a kind-hearted man,
promised to wait for the rest. There was a
touch of solemnity in the family atmosphere again
when Julia came home from his all-day trip to the
apothecary’s. Lcmpi and Martti both wanted
the pretty paper cap on the bottle, and Riina felt
refreshed enough to chide, between gasps, the
squabbling children.

Pain was unavoidable, but so were the demands
of everyday life. Juha realized that well enough
and showed no hesitation in leaving Riina for
days in the care of the children, while he went
about his business in the village. He had to
work oftener on the farm now that he lacked a
horse. The small quantity of grain yielded by
the field had also to be milled. He had to drag it
on a hand-cart now to the village mill, and once
there he had to hang around for hours, for it was
the miller’s busy season and even farmers tended
to quarrel over turns. After such journeys

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 187

midnight would be near when Juha at last found
himself on the forest track, hungry and stopping
every now and again to wipe his bald head. In
some way, however, the flour on the cart seemed
to have achieved a new value, for he could not
help the comforting thought coming into his mind
that this flour would not start disappearing with¬
out his knowledge. At home he would find him¬
self back in the old familiar circumstances—and
the smell, which felt doubly bad after a long walk
in the fresh night. The children slept on; the
parents only glanced at each other, wearily and
resignedly, without a word.

The hidden cancer did its work, and the dis¬
gusting smell of rotting tissue became ever worse
in the room. The smaller children grew more
or less used to it when the autumn rains forced
them to spend the whole of their time indoors.
For Hiltu it was worse. Slender of limb and
grave as a statue she moved about on the tasks
formerly done by her mother. She never con¬
versed with her mother, but simply did as she
was told. Riina spoke with difficulty and for
that reason rarely asked how the work was going
on. It was not always easy for Hiltu to under¬
stand her broken murmurs; she would sometimes
distinguish such words as: “ what—do—I—

care—Jesus—help me—” The latter words filled
Hiltu with dread. She stood stock-still, staring
with dilated eyes at her mother. Was she going

l88 MEEK HERITAGE

to die? Mother panted again, moveless, her
eyes dosed. Hiltu went to milk the cow with a
strange sense weighing on her mind of being far
away from her mother. Still an infant at heart,
she was being thrust into the part of an adult.

Once when Juha was again away late and the
younger children already slept, Hiltu dozed off
in the dusk on Julia’s bed. She dreamed vague
tender dreams, hearing meanwhile her mother
calling to her. Her heart nearly stopped beating
when she awoke and found that mother was really
calling. It was nearly dark in the room; what
had happened ? She was afraid to answer until
mother called again.

“ What? ” asked Hiltu in distress.

“ Light the lamp.”

Hiltu obeyed, before her eyes the terrible fact
that father was away from home. Mother is
dying, and what is to become of them, alone in
the forest ? Should she arouse Tempi and Martti?
She caught a glimpse of their thin faces in the
bed before turning to her mother. The woman’s
agonized expression brought the child to her
side. Hiltu crossed the room with a sensation of
being already alone in the heart of the forest
But mother was still alive and begging her to do
something. Begging her to help, for the first
time during the whole course of her illness. . . .
Hiltu sees all the sorry secrets of the sick woman,
feels a damp, warm stench on her face. She felt

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 189

horribly sick, but experienced at the same time
something new, an intimate relationship with her
mother, as if she and her mother were of the same
age. She noted for the first time the yellow skin
and startling leanness that have transformed
mother’s expression, making it almost pure. At
this moment she would not be afraid even were
mother to die in her hands.

Riina did not die that night. Juha was away
so late because he had gone to consult the old
master of Pirjola. He had meant to ask the old
man for a loan, but the master had guided the
conversation so skilfully that Juha was unable to
come round to the object of his visit. Instead,
the old man listened with great sympathy to his
account of Riina’s illness and showed no sign of
uneasiness any time the name of God crept into
the talk. Finally the old master explained in
detail the remedy his experience led him to
believe was best for Riina’s complaint. And
Juha was so carried away by gratitude that he
almost succeeded in making himself believe that
it was for that he had come to consult the old man.

He came home while Hiltu was helping her
mother. The unwonted spectacle and the new
expression on Riina’s face wakened a conviction
at the bottom of his mind that Riina was past
medicines, but all the more reason was there for
him to do something on his part. He was only
doubtful whether to go Out at once to search in

MEEK HERITAGE

igO

the dark for the necessary ingredients or whether
to wait until the morning. Riina seemed to calm
down; she dosed her eyes and lay still. Juha
and Hiltu lay down too, but left the lamp burning.

Nothing untoward happened that night. No
sooner was it daylight than Juha went out to look
for his ingredients, which were nothing very re¬
markable, merely bird-cherry bark. Of this a
strong decoction was to be brewed and given to
the patient when it had sufficiently cooled. As
the liquid was bitter, a little sugar could be given
between sips.

In the morning Riina was so weak that Juha
had to hold her up while she drank the brew.
She refused at first to take it, but by passionate
entreaties Juha persuaded her to swallow three
good gulps. It all came up at once, with such
force that it was a marvel the sick woman did not
give up the ghost there and then. A wave of
remorse surged over Juha; it was nearly as
though he had unintentionally tortured a little
pet animal. That was all he got for his pains.
Riina made a fumbling movement towards the
seat of her trouble, and on raising the coverlet
Juha saw that she had bled profusely. Juha
made as though to do something to help, but the
sick woman said in a faint voice, “ Never mind.”
Juha replaced the coverlet.

Those were Riina’s last words. After that she
relapsed into unconsciousness, though the life

DEATH DOES ITS BEST igi

did not leave her body until towards evening.
In the dilapidated cabin the father and three
children waited for hours to see the mother die.
Now and again one of them would move away,
sit down and then return to the bedside. At
last came the death-rattle. Riina Toivola slept
the sleep of death, the woman who during her
life had been a bad servant and perhaps a still
worse crofter’s wife, but who had notwithstanding
achieved that exacting position and been given
the duty of bringing several new human beings
into the world. All her life she had been a
negligible person, yet at her death her children
sobbed outright.

Even Juha was moved. It brought, somehow,
into his mind the death of his own mother in that
far-distant locality. The sensation of that alien
house cut as with a knife through Juha’s memories
of his past life, and standing beside his sobbing
children he felt that this was his home. Against
his will his eyes grew moist and a bright drop
trickled on to his nose.

The death of a wife, especially after a long
married life, arouses in thehusband the feeling that
invisible, deep roots are being torn out of his
substance. The effect is powerful no matter
what the nature of those roots may have been.
In very many cases marriage is a heavy burden
on both partners, often an unconscious burden.

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192

In the circumstances the death of one of the
partners denotes the removal of a burden, and a
coarse-minded person takes no pains to hide this.
Many, however, experience along with the sense
of liberation a deep longing; their mood is one
of melancholy happiness. A person of this type
tries instinctively to fill the empty spaces left
by the roots wrenched out of his being with his or
her children; should these take root there is no
accompanying sense of burden, but only a pure
and light feeling of' compensation. That is what
happened in Juha Toivola’s case.

On the day Riina died and on many succeeding
days Juha found existence so mildly harmonious
that he had never experienced the like since the
night when he became certain that Riina was to
be his. He did not bawl at the children, but
fussed about with them like a motherly old bird.
Now life really was like a holiday. All the prob¬
lems attaching to Juha’s tenancy of the croft had
vanished. Just then an eviction would have
been a matter of no consequence, an event in the
class of the flight of a crow across the field, which
Juha had witnessed while a hymn was being sung
for the departed soul. The eviction of a man
whose wife had just died, leaving behind her little
children, would be something uplifting rather
than the reverse—it would be the kind of softened
fate that arouses no tigerish instincts in neighbours,
as a harder fate often does.

DEATH DOES ITS BEST I§3

The shyness Juha naturally felt in the presence
of the master because of those arrears of work was
so completely forgotten that it was with the great¬
est ease he went to tell the master his troubles:
he hadn’t the money to see his dead wife properly
to the grave. And the master gave him the
money—-Juha had never doubted that he would—
how not, to a man whose wife had just died ?
Everything was turning out splendidly. What
better off would he have been if he had got that
horse he wanted. A cow was all he really needed;
it provided the food they required in addition to
bread, and there was now no fear of the bread
giving out, with one mouth—and one bread-
thief—less in the house. Hiltu, too, would doubt¬
less soon be going out somewhere to work. That
would leave him alone with only Lempi and
Martti. All would be well. The anxiety that
had beset Juha that time on the heath road was
now far away. He found himself unconsciously
humming a hymn-tune.

The change made itself felt in all kinds of
little ways. Before, when old women called at
Toivola, Juha used to be surly to them, suspecting
them of helping to pull down his fortunes; what
else did they come for if not to drink coffee
and smuggle away bags of grain or flour? Now
he had to ask those old women to lay Riina out
in her coffin, and he was pleased when they came.
At first their expressions were solemn, but when
o

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194

everything was over and the body had been taken
to the barn, their tongues began to wag, no more
controlling them, and it was a near thing they
didn’t start marrying off Juha again. After the
women had gone Juha felt lonely. If only the
burial were over, that was the first thing. . . .

It became ever easier for Juha to adapt his
language so as to bring in the word of God. To
talk based on the word of God few people can
take exception. After Juha had held an auction
and sold his sets of harness and other odds and
ends, he appeared one Sunday morning in the
farm kitchen. He talked for a while with the
mistress until the master came and invited him
into the parlour, an honour that had not befallen
him since his first visit to the farm to arrange
about the croft with the former old master.
Juha paid back the money he had borrowed.
The talk then veered of itself to the subject of the
croft. The master remarked stiffly that Juha
was quite a large number of work-days in arrears,
which Juha in a gentle tone admitted, but pointed
out that life had treated him badly this summer
in every way. The master agreed and said that
he was unwilling to press Juha, but that some
arrangement would now have to be made.
Horseless as he was, Juha would not be able to
farm all the land attached to the croft. Juha
was secretly startled and tried to argue that
perhaps he would still—somehow. . . .

DEATH DOES ITS BEST I95

“ You’ll never get another horse,” said the
master, his tone once more stiff. “ And you’re
not much use there anyhow. Bleeding the land
dry and stealing forest ...”

“ I’ve never—without asking leave,” stammered
Juha.

“ When did you get leave to touch that patch
beside the far meadow?” The master glared
angrily at Tuha.

“ I haven’t.”

“ I know what I know.”

Juha was dumbfounded. The idea of being
evicted, coming in this fashion, was terrible.
It was clear that the master meant to evict him,
talking like that. Juha had never seen the young
master look so determined before; he had never
heard him use that tone.

The master, meanwhile, had no intention of
evicting Juha; he would have been ashamed to
do so. Only in some way Juha always got on his
nerves and he wanted once for all to put an end
to this feeling of hidden irritation. Juha had
become too familiar and seemed to be trying in
some secret way to get the better of him. Hence
the master’s unwonted sternness.

The Sunday morning wore on to the ticking of
the clock. Juha sat in the parlour in utmost
discomfort as though the place were too hot.
When matters gradually began to take a smoother
course, Juha’s agony changed to a subdued joy,

MEEK. HERITAGE

I96

to a cordial agreement with everything the
master said. It was settled at last that Juha
was to surrender the land at Toivola except for a
patch a little bigger than an acre. He could stay
on in the cabin, the cow could graze in the forest,
and from the fallen timber he was to be entitled
to gather a stack two fathoms long every year.
In return he was to work thirty days on the farm
without his food and another ten days with his
meals. And the day he laid hands on the timber
without leave, well, he knew what to expect then.

The farm-hands were at dinner in the kitchen
when Juha, his cheeks flaming, went past them
on his way home. The funeral over and the
matter of the croft settled, Juha was in a hurry
to get back to the children and eat his dinner
with them.

Cowberry-time had come.

Juha went with Hiltu to the family’s old
favourite berrying-sites which had often before
helped to bring in a little money. How much
money berrying used to bring in, it was hard to
say, for Juha had always been kept busy at
autumn tasks on the land when berrying-time
came round and had thus had no opportunity
of seeing the money come or the spending of it.
This year there was no farm-work to keep him
away, and Juha plunged with enthusiasm into
the fascinating, clean work of gathering and

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 197

selling berries. Berrying as work is entirely
different from the fanning of a croft. Each time
you empty your can into the big pail you see at
once with a pleasant thrill how the pile grows.
And it is all clear profit; no question here of
contracts and work-days, no lying up because of
snow or rain. Farming a croft and other such
back-breaking toil is not really profit at all, only
a kind of stuffing to fill in your life, something
inseparably bound up with the wife, brats, sick¬
ness and other worries. Juha had had his full
share of that; now he feels that he has a chance
to earn something. And there are other ways
of earning. Too late this year to collect bark,
but wait till summer comes again and that too
will yield a nice bit of money.

The sphere of Juha’s activities shrinks, but in
shrinking becomes solider and jollier. Three
children are left to look after the house when
Juha goes off to sell the berries. And soon only
Lempi and Martti are at home after Hiltu has
gone to gather a new lot of berries. Ville has
gone, mother has gone, the hot summer has
gone; it is autumn now—au-um, as Martti,
prompted by Lempi, repeats. There is a languid
stillness in the air; in cabins innumerable the
day wears on rayless from morning to eve.

The familiar figure of Juha Toivola can be
seen measuring out berries at the door of a villa.
A bargain has been struck and Juha wears an

MEEK HERITAGE

I98

important air, for he now knows about how much
the berries are going to yield.

The stout lady of the villa watches the berries
being measured out and when that is satisfactorily
over she gives Juha a note and says, “ Haven’t
you a girl who’s past Confirmation age? ”

Juha pauses in the middle of the sum he is doing
in his head and answers, “ Yes, Hiltu.”

“ I thought so. My aunt who married a
Rector and who’s a widow now wants a girl for
the house-work and she’d sooner have a country
girl than one from town, a religious woman like
her. Is your girl quiet and steady ? ”

Juha is still busy with his calculations. He
answers absently, muttering nervously to himself,
until he is certain what change to give.

Then, fumbling in his bag, he says, “ Hiltu’s a
girl you won’t find the likes of anywhere. What
did you say your aunt was, miss? ”

The day is misty and so still that a cock can
be heard crowing on a distant farm. Through
the villages Juha tramps the highway towards
his home, his basket empty and money in his
pocket. Hiltu has been promised to the Rector’s
widow. Ever freer and higher soars Juha’s
life. Hiltu will get on in new surroundings. My
girl is good enough for the gentry to want her.
She’s sure to find a few pickings for Lempi and
Martti. Less and less will be needed to keep the
family going, now Hiltu is leaving. I can look

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 199

after the cow myself. It’ll be harder those days
I have to be at the farm, but we’ll manage some¬
how. Juha began to calculate and plan how
he would arrange things now, with everything
becoming almost too easy. In the calm moist
air he can still hear the cock crowing. He has
hard work getting rid of a feeling that this calm
bodes no good.

Hiltu is going away into service. She cries a
little when she hears of it; for some reason it
brings mother into her mind. She raises no
objections, however, but is soon wholly rapt up
in her coming departure. She talks and spends
more time with the other children than before,
and teaches them once more all the children’s
games she knows. Juha overhears the children
asking: “ What’s a villa like ? What’s a Rector ? ”
And in between Hiltu sheds tears for her mother,
for it is only two days to Saturday.

A strange, pure atmosphere reigns in the
Toivola cabin during the preparations for Hiltu’s
departure. These preparations are made with¬
out haste, and the prevailing sensation is one of
waiting. Until a morning dawns when the
family, awakening from sleep, remember that
to-day Hiltu is going.

The sun shines that day. It shines on Hiltu’s
new greased-leather boots and white pigtail
ribbon. In her travelling garb she is a marvel¬
lously fragile being, parted long ago from the

200

MEEK HERITAGE

others. She is going far away, to that strange
place, and with mother already gone everyone
feels that the parting is for ever. And this know¬
ledge wraps her round with a curious glow. The
children are grave. They are shut up in the
cabin while father is seeing Hiltu off. There they
go, past the cowhouse. Two little heads press
close to the window, but the staring eyes cannot
follow the traveller and her escort very far; the
last they see is Hiltu’s heel, like a separate little
image that quickly becomes distorted in a bubble
in the glass. The children remain for some time
with their noses flattened against the pane. Then
they drop down from the bench into the empty
room, where the pensive spirit of Hiltu still seems
to dwell.

A great, or at any rate a unique event has
occurred. The postman has brought something
for Johan Toivola, Crofter. A letter and some
newspapers have arrived for him. They had
lain a week on the kitchen window-sill at the
farm before Juha, coming to the farm to work,
got them from the hand of the kitchen-maid.

“ Toivola has turned Socialist, I see,” joked the
master when he saw Juha’s copies of The People’s
News. Juha was amazed at receiving newspapers
addressed to him. The letter was most likely
from Hiltu—though even that seemed queer to
Juha.

DEATH DOES ITS BEST

201

“ You read it, Iita,” he begged.

“ I’ll read it if you’ll hand it over.”

“ Don’t give her it,” put in the master.
“ Might be a love-letter.”

“ Go on, read it,” urged Juha.

“ It’s from Kalle—see, there’s his name Kaarlo
Toivola at the bottom,” Iita remarked.

“ Ay, but read it, so that I can hear what he
says before I go off to my work.”

The letter began “ My Dear Father, Sister and
Brother ” and then came the usual conventional
phrases about snow-white paper, a cold pen¬
holder and a warm hand “ that cannot reach
yours to link, so has to do it in ink.” The writer
declared that he was in good health and hoped
they were enjoying the same blessing. “ I am
now a cab-driver or cabby and doing well, I
am earning more than you country joskins not
being skinned by a bloodsucking farmer and I
am sending you The People’s Mews so that you
can learn about the proletariat. ...”

The writer further reported that Hiltu was
now in Tampere, or not exactly in Tampere, but
at a villa near by, and that the mistress was a
more genteel woman than any in your parish and
had often hired him to drive her home from town.
He had seen Hiltu and had once been given coffee
in her kitchen. . . .

“ And so mother is dead, I heard about her
from old man Piijola at the cab-rank and that is

202 MEEK HERITAGE

the worker’s fate always to die and Ville lad is
dead too. ...”

The whole household listened while the letter
was read out, and when it came to an end the
master remarked:

“ Sounds like that fellow was as clever with his
pen as with his tongue.”

The letter and the newspapers aroused mixed
feelings in Juha’s breast. He had almost forgot¬
ten Kalle’s existence, and for some reason there
was something unreal to him in this sign of life.
It was as though Kalle had fallen on evil ways,
and that gave rise to suspicions about what Hiltu
might be doing. On the face of it he had to
admit that both children had prospered beyond
all expectation and climbed to heights you would
never have thought any child of his and Riina’s
could reach. A liveried town cabby was next
door to a gentleman in Juha’s eyes; no better
thing could happen to a crofter’s son than to be
beyond the need for toiling for dear life in fields
or forests, taking things easy on a cabby’s box.
Only Juha had his doubts about Kalle’s capacity
to fill such a post honourably; he would have
been easier in his mind if he had heard that
Kalle was a farm-hand sleeping in the corner of
another man’s kitchen; though of course the
whole letter might be a pack of lies. With Hiltu
it was different; she deserved her present luck

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 203

a good deal better. For her it was right not to
have to mess about in cow-dung, but only dust
the furniture in rich people’s rooms. She had
been humble and gentle in her ways since her
childhood. Only there was now the fear that
Kalle might be leading her too astray.

Thus, as Juha walked home in the moonlight
his mind was strangely empty. The dreamlike
harmonious mood of the past weeks had vanished;
his thoughts did not run on ahead this time to the
children in the warmth of the cabin, but wandered
far afield in the tracks of Kalle’s cab. There was
an everyday look again about the world although
the moon was shining; he almost felt like wanting
to quarrel with somebody for a change. ‘ What
does he think he is, a lout like him, prancing about,
a cabby, while I have to slave here. This very
minute I’m so tired I can hardly move my feet,
and when I get home there’ll be the cow to tend.
It was all through him we had all that trouble
with poor dead Ville; cost a lot it did too. Has
he ever sent us anything . . . cabby . . .’

Old Juha realized that he had not much
looked ahead in his lifetime; he had been beaten
by his own rascally son. The picture of life as
something sour and silly threatened to take hold
of him again; the peace of these last weeks
seemed to be taking its rightful place beside the
fancies that had led to his summer visit to Tuorila
and to be sharing their colouring. Again it was

MEEK. HERITAGE

204

as though he were returning crestfallen from a
journey; and now there wasn’t even a wife
waiting for him at home. The moonlight made
the cabin look like a dead giant of olden times.
If only Hiltu were still at home.

Juha had no definite grounds for his bad
humour, but when, sitting beside the lamp, he
began to glance through the newspapers, the
news in them made him more irritable than ever.
He had a feeling of having been left behind, in a
freezing solitude. Yonder in the bed slept two
poor beings, brought into the world, but nothing
else. . . . And here he sat on this autumn night
in the heart of the woods, a man going on for
sixty.

Newspapers continued to come for him by
every mail. Juha read them in the evenings, his
mood sullen and quarrelsome. The articles he
read did not specially interest him; they were
written in the same cocksure aggravating style as
Kalle’s letter. They spoke of poverty with a kind
of pride, like badly brought up louts, or with a
sugary emotion that sickened Juha. They
aroused no enthusiasm in him. He read them
as it were defiantly, to keep alive his own spite,
now that life had again toppled down to this
level.

Daily existence with two helpless children was
after all a trial. He was too old to look after the
cow properly; he handled the milk clumsily. It

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 205

had been stupid of him to let Hiltu go so far away.
Yet it wouldn’t be right to tell her to come back ;
how was he to feed and clothe her? And all at
once, Lempi’s and Martti’s case began to look
desperate to him too. £ Suppose something
happens to me out here, what’s going to become
of them? And what if I grow too old to work
before they are able to look after themselves ? ’
Juha missed his wife. For all her faults she had
her good points. While she was in good health
he had at least been able to sleep properly. Now
it was always as though he were being called upon
to sleep in a strange bed. Even while Hiltu was
at home life had been easier.

Juha longed more and more for Hiltu. Several
times he made up his mind in dull anger that he
would have her back. Hispresent bad temper was
harder to bear than any irritability he had felt
while his wife was alive. His spite reached out
farther this time, right to where Kalle and Hiltu
were living, and a new element entered into it:
the threat of approaching helpless old age.

But then came an event that resolved his
questionings for a time—for the last time before
everything was resolved for him.

A day had come again when Juha had to be at
the farm. The times had greatly altered; work
began now at six. And the work this time was
mere messing about, nothing to do but keep the

MEEK HERITAGE

206

threshing machine fed. At twelve the master
blew a blast on the steam-whistle and the men
went in to dinner. The farm-hands went to the
kitchen, but Juha and another man who had to
feed themselves went to their food-bags in the
living-room. As on many other days.

Juha had taken a few swigs at his milk-flask,
when Iita came into the living-room with his
newspapers and said, “ There’s a letter for you
as well.”

The letter had only just come, fresh from the
postman’s hands. Iita had to read it for him,
and when she opened it a ten-mark note fluttered
to the floor. What could that mean?

Again the same opening phrases and wishes for
good health . . . “ and I have to break the sad
news to you that your dear daughter Hiltu is
dead; she drowned herself in the lake the night
before last when it was moonlight and the
mistress was away. The mistress’s son was at
home, but he was upstairs just going to bed and
didn’t know anything about it until in the morn¬
ing when it was too late.

“ And Hiltu is being buried the day after
to-morrow in case you want to come, the mistress
is paying for it, but she said she was not giving any
wages as Hiltu was such a short time with her that
it only covers the funeral and I am putting in
this ten marks for you to buy yourself something
with and there is a notice in Wednesday’s People's

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 207

News about Hiltu’s death, it cost two marks, and
news about it inside the paper, death is trying you
hard, but it is the proletariat’s lot to die and
you ought to join the battle with us seeing that
you are a worker and cast off the yoke of
capitalism.”

Juha’s mind stopped working, so that for a
little while he knew nothing of what was going on
around him. He failed to see the mistress come
angrily into the room to fetch lita, who was
looking up the paragraph about Hiltu’s death,
nor did he hear her snap: “ What’s keeping you
from your work—and I won’t have such papers
read in this house! ” Juha would have had
cause to take offence at that. But he hardly
noticed the mistress.

So Hiltu, too, was dead. Hadn’t that been
perfectly clear when she went? Hadn’t it been
clear ever since she was a child ? And as pictures
of Hiltu as she used to be rose in Juha’s mind, he
saw her, in all of them, hurrying to meet her
death. The idea became ineradicably implanted
in Juha’s mind that Hiltu had died an accidental
death.

In other respects the news left Juha coldly
miserable. No melancholy sense of liberation
awoke in him this time. He returned after
dinner to work along with the other men. On
them the news of Hiltu Toivola’s death made
little impression; they reacted to it as to a piece

MEEK HERITAGE

208

of news duly noted; it is not the kind of subject
on which one can start a conversation while at
work. There are more masculine matters to be
bandied, especially with the master present. Deep
below the surface of their remarks looms the class
problem. The master had to listen to veiled
barbs bearing on that problem. With the self-
confidence of superior wisdom he talked his own
common-sense. At such moments the work
instinctively quickens in pace. Old Toivolafinally
says something so downright ugly that the other
men grin. The master controls himself with an
obvious effort.

“ Even an old ram soon gets swelled up with
democracy, I see, particularly when he gets it in
cab-loads.”

The bow had never been drawn so taut before
on this farm. The atmosphere was strained after
that right up to supper-time. The work in hand
seemed to withdraw into itself and become a
separate entity, making three stiffly aloof ele¬
ments in all: the master, the men and the job.
The three together formed as it were a closed
field of energy, so enormously much bigger,
rawer and more masculine than the death of any
Hiltu, that to include them in one and the same
thought was unnatural in a distasteful manner.

No feeling of liberation came to lighten this new
blow. No sense of roots being tom out, no
longing for compensation. Juha’s mood was

DEATH DOES ITS BEST 20g

keyed to an evil pitch as he strode along his forest
track that evening. The moon shone, but its
right-hand rim had already shrunk and its light
fell chill on the crazy cabin. No pensive light of
past days shone from it; it was wholly of the
present. It seemed to be hastening to complain
to him that it was sorely in need of repairs, that
it lay on land belonging to an enemy, was the
property of that enemy, and that inside it were
two human beings whose existence was not
specially desirable.

The road onward was clear.

VI

THE REBEL

It would be hard to think of a more purely
artificial subject for study than the precise nature
of Juha Toivola’s attitude towards that time
of national distress known as the period of
Russian oppression. Juha Toivola’s own suffer¬
ings during that period were no more remarkable
tBan at any other time, nor could he observe
in the small world in which he dwelt any other
sufferings out of the ordinary. The master of
the farm, at any rate, did not suffer, for he grew
steadily richer; during those years his cattle
increased from twelve cows in milk to eighteen,
his horses by two. His manner towards his men
had become more closed and at the same time
more irritable—bossier, the men put it.

No, the master did not suffer, nor to any new
extent did Juha. The uncertainty of his position
began, to be sure, to be revealed to Juha about
that time; he had no contract, and the best
forests on the farm lay round his cabin. But in
some ways things had improved. The working-
day had shrunk from fifteen to twelve hours and
the work was easier; the old threshing machine
turned by hand had given way to one worked by

210

THE REBEL

211

a horse and that again to a steam-machine;
scythes were now needed on the farm only to
open the ends of plots. True, one of the new
machines, the separator, changed the former
full-bodied buttermilk into a thin blue liquid and
led to the substitution of “ vegetable ” butter,
known among the farm-hands as “ blossom,”
for good honest butter.

People of Juha’s type could not with the best
will in the world have said what had all of a
sudden made the situation of the Finnish
“ people ” so exceedingly difficult. As the
farmers were obviously growing fatter and there
were no signs of impoverishment or leanness in
the gentlemen living in the parishes, the lowly
people were utterly at a loss to know what the
distress and confusion in those quarters was
about. * Their jobs must be in some kind of
danger,’ they thought.

Schools were organized in private houses, and
jolly enough those were. Big men could be
seen sitting on benches and displaying con¬
siderable gifts for picking out the countries of
Europe on the map, but there were also boys who
joined the girls in giggling when the flaxen¬
haired young gentleman, with tears in his eyes,
related the history of the “fatherland.” The
home schools dried up before long, but not before
many brains had been shaken into life by the
impulses gained from them, brains which there-

212 MEEK HERITAGE

after began to think matters over on their own
account.

Juha was not even among those influenced by
the schools. He heard talk about them—there
was one in his own village—but in his opinion
they were tarred with the same brush as many
other meetings and lectures; at bottom, however
skilfully the fact might be hidden, they all aimed
at one and the same thing: at prying money
out of the people. Juha was convinced that
even at the “ home schools ” some kind of ticket
would have to be bought before all was over—
it stood to reason, for how else were such school¬
masters to starch their collars? And he felt a
mild satisfaction at knowing that he had never
felt tempted to go, never been tricked. He might
not have known how to get rich, but he had never
been so childish as to go and pay for any tickets.

Such was Juha’s relation to the period of
oppression; even to speak of it somehow has an
artificial ring. It was to him on a par with the
Young People’s Company or whatever its name
was in the church village, which had its own tricks
for parting soft young farm-hands and servant-
girls from their money.

In the circumstances the first General Strike
passed him by, its purpose entirely uncompre¬
hended. Of course he knew about it—he had
ears—but in all the talk there was something

THE REBEL

213

that irritated Juha. That there was some trickery
at the bottom of it, Juha was convinced, and a
remark of Rinne’s, who was spokesman for the
workers, after the strike had been called off,
stuck in his mind. Rinne said: “ The workers
polished the gentlemen’s buttons.”

Juha set no value on the vote to which he too
had become entitled, and at the first elections
he didn’t trouble to vote. His private life gave
him enough to think about, the year before the
deaths in the family. ‘ Let those vote who
haven’t my troubles. It won’t give them bread.’

It was after the General Strike of 1905 that
the workers’ movement really got under way
in Finland; after eager agitators had begun
to tour the country, associations sprung up and
newspapers appeared to fan the blaze. Three
years after the strike Juha Toivola declared
himself a “temocrat,” and in all probability
he was one, but—incredible as it may sound—
neither the strike, nor the agitators, and certainly
not the newspapers had done anything to bring
this about ; they had no influence whatever over
polka-clipped, bald Juha. He could not be
bothered to go trapezing after agitators from
his remote cabin. Newspapers came into his
hands, and mostly he read them, or such parts
as happened to strike his eye, news of frauds and

MEEK HERITAGE

214

offers of marriage, until after Hiltu’s death he
stopped spelling his way through them; he had
never put any faith in such tales.

The night after the letter telling of Hiltu’s
death came, Juha lay outstretched on his bed,
unable to sleep. He let his mind dwell first on
Hiltu’s departure and on his own share in it—
her death as such did not occupy his mind
much. A faint moonlight filled the room;
he could hear Lempi and Martti breathing.
At moments like this, when time and locality
are only vaguely apprehended, even the weakest
brain flits with the greatest ease over wide
territories of thought. A crofter in his fifties
who has lost a wife and children cannot help
thoughts of his own death and, above all, of the
slice of life still left to him coming into his mind.
Hour after hour passes; he takes the quid from
his mouth and puts it back again, gets up for a
drink of water and lies down again. He has a
sensation of lying in a windy deserted room;
sleep refuses to enter there. The two children
sleeping like that in this silence are dreadfully
alien to him; they are children whose arrival
in the world was no signal for rejoicing, children
left behind by their mother.

So long as an old crofter has a wife, even a
bad wife, and growing children, in other words a
family and household, his burden may be as
heavy as it possibly can be and yet his life will

THE REBEL

215

be a full one: a continuous tenacious living,
level, hard and free from thought. In a sense
he has laid down his burden and makes no
attempt to carry it farther.

And so it goes on for years. Until the sleepless
night comes when he discovers that not even
this burden is left to him. Death has been
liberal with its mercies. But now ease becomes
a burden. Around him is emptiness, a drear
emptiness left after his deliverance from his
burden, a vacuum attracting thoughts over
which he has no control; and for an untrained
mind that is misery. With the great encompass¬
ing atmosphere of a household lost to him, he
sees with pitiless clarity the countless minor
deficiencies of his life. He has seen them of
course before this, on occasions when he was
alone and away from the household, but above
them was that which awaited him at home:
his wife, children, cow, in a word, the household.
However wretched it was, it was something to
which each member of the family unconsciously
clung for protection; while it existed, even God
was as though a feature of it. Now this solid
centre of things has dropped out; the flat
expanse of all-life has risen to a level with the
ego. The two sleeping children have become
encumbrances, minor matters the main thing.

Deep under the surface of Juha’s waking mood
an instinctive desire for new company was

MEEK HERITAGE

2l6

already stirring. This deserted cabin was not
home—why, even Hiltu would never be co ming
back to it. . . .

And so, about this time, a new trait could be
observed in Juha Toivola; he began to hang
about the village and drop in at houses where he
was known, to sit and jaw for hours at a stretch.
He criticized the way of the world, his voice
rising and becoming almost angry. His observa¬
tions were coloured throughout by a tacit
intimation that he had examined it all in person
and that these were his conclusions, not those
of an ordinary common “ temocrat.” In his talk
phrases like “ as the Saviour says ” still tended
to crop up.

“ Old Toivola was prophesying again half the
day at our place,” the village women would re¬
mark to each other.

After carrying on thus for hours Juha would
return home gloomier than ever. As he walked
through the forest he would feel as though he
had been straightening matters out for a pack
of strangers, or as though he had undertaken a
long complicated business on their behalf. The
feeling was distasteful to him, for in his funda¬
mental character there was no love for his fellow-
men. He had endured them, having had to
put up with them since his childhood. But

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217

never had human beings—in the mass, as they
fill this world—been wholly well-disposed towards
him, neither poor nor rich.

In reality, thus, philanthropic ideals were
alien to Juha’s nature. But life is made up of
conflicting forces, and some obstinate force arising
out of accidental events in his career drove him
to hold forth on this ideal of “ temocracy ” in other
people’s houses. This force is as it were related
to the circumstance that the cabin is cold to him
and refuses to warm him. He has got to preach
to other people. And in these abstract discus¬
sions he is never wholly in agreement with any¬
one else. However clearly he may grasp the
truth of some “temocratic” principle or other
enunciated by another man, he will not nod his
head in agreement, but has to invent his own,
often very obscure grounds for it which the other
speaker had failed to observe, true as his grasp
of the principle may have been. Old Toivola
simply has to prophesy.

And he goes on prophesying, marking time as
it were without getting any farther, for many
years, whilst the Finnish Labour Movement,
under the guidance of its young starch-collared
leaders, grows and develops. Those white-collar
men are alien, almost abhorrent to him, for he
cannot get rid of his old suspicion that, to some
extent at least, they are out to line their own

MEEK HERITAGE

2l8

pockets. A white-collar man, again, hearing
Juha spouting, will regard him with lack-lustre,
embarrassed eyes.

And so it went on until the great war came,
bringing with it the sufferings by which mankind
was to be purified for the historical duties set the
twentieth century. Only the people, because
their souls were an inheritance from the nine¬
teenth century, sat reading their newspapers in
the late summer evenings, trying to guess which
side would win and meanwhile going on living
in the belief that afterwards everything would
be as before; it was pleasantly exciting to be
living in such stirring times. The war would
be over by Christmas, people thought, but when
a second Christmas came and there was still no
sign of its coming to a close, they began to feel
anxious, unconsciously divining that the matter
would not end with a victory achieved by force
of arms, but would be followed by even longer
complications.

In the circumstances the clash of arms became
a period of respite, and incredibly it proved that
while the terrible carnage was going on people
were less disciplined in their lives than in times
of peace; they lived during the deluge as man¬
kind was formerly said to live before a deluge.
The principles and ideals which the previous
century had tinkered with in the intervals between

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219

business were revealed as ink and paper only.
One of the pitiful sights of the age was to see men
of ripe age sitting beside their deflated ideals,
pitiful because they seemed really to have believed
in them. Youth was happier, having for long
refused to believe in those ideals. Youth roamed
the streets and highways, danced and made
merry, and some mysteriously vanished in cir¬
cumstances strongly tinged with a flavour of
forbidden high politics. On the whole life
was a day-to-day affair.

Until the crash came in Russia. In all
secrecy that crash left an unpleasant taste of
disappointment in many Finnish mouths. What
was to come next, now that good business and
abundant employment on fortification works were
suddenly at an end ? Having recovered its
balance a little the nation hastened to manifest
its admirable faithfulness to the indivisibility
of the Empire. In token of this faithfulness
various kisses and signatures were exchanged,
all without criticism of any kind at the time,
though the Press was then free. The affair
of the vanished youths, their destination now
an open secret, was deplored; by the laws of
Finland they were guilty of high treason in
seeking out the enemy for military training for
a rising that the Russian Revolution had now
made unnecessary. This phase of faithfulness

220 MEEK HERITAGE

endured up to the Bolshevik Revolution, which
from being a crime gradually became a political
fait accompli. By then the Independence Move¬
ment was being openly discussed in ordinary
citizen circles.

In his own submerged depths Juha Toivola
continued to exist as before; indeed at this
moment he was as actively engaged in creating
history for his nation as anyone.

On a beautiful May morning, when the scent
of the earth and its vegetation was at its sweetest
and touches of yellow already caught the eye
along the banks of ditches, Juha might have been
seen approaching the village, warmed by his
walk, his eyes in his hairy face glittering wide¬
awake and restless. He looks younger than ten
years ago; with summer coming on like this—
and for other reasons as well—there seems to be
less cause for worry. He enjoys the knowledge
that he is going to spend the day in the open
lands. He is not going to the farm to work, but
to Rinne’s place.

Earlier that spring Juha had happened to be
in the church village the day the funeral of the
victims of the Revolution was being celebrated.
People streamed in from all directions in long
columns; red flags fluttered even in the ranks
of some of the columns. Juha reached the
Kuuskoski cross-roads just as the column of
workers from the paper mill came along. A

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221

voice from the ranks ordered Juha with a touch
of brusqueness to fall in. Juha retorted, “ I
know my place as well as you do,” and fell into
line.

Marching there he stared at the red neck of
the young man who had ordered him about,
thinking, ‘who do you fancy you are?’ The
columns met at the Young People’s Society
building and a meeting was soon under way.
Some of the gentlemen in the village had hoisted
blue and white flags and the meeting fell to
discussing what action was to be taken in regard
to this counter-revolutionary demonstration.

Still irritated by the brusqueness with which
he had been ordered to join the marchers,
Juha spoke at the meeting, for the first time in
his life. He was stared at, and Juha enjoyed
that. His speech was brief and wholly irrevelant
to the matter at issue, yet it had the result that
he was elected to the deputation that went to
demand the removal of the offending colours.
The leader of the deputation was the same red¬
necked Kuuskoski man who had officiously
taken upon himself to give orders to Juha, but
Juha, as the oldest “ temocrat ” present, had his
say as well. And his words were far from polite.
When, later in the day, the gentry discussed the
days’ happenings, they asked each other, “ Who
was that tangle-faced old fellow? He was about
the worst of the lot.”

222

MEEK. HERITAGE

So Juha became drawn into the swe lling
turmoil of the times, and he remained faithful
to the call almost to the end. On his return
that day to his home his thoughts still ran high
with defiance even in the solitude of his forest
track. He seemed still to see before him all the
new faces that had stared at him during the day,
first at the meeting, then in the homes of the
gentry. All those faces inspired in him the same
faintly spiteful feeling. He needed no one to
order him about; he knew what he was doing
. . . ‘ They don’t know the first thing about
temocracy—telling me. . . .’

The cabin came into sight, as on a thousand
other evenings. £ Evict me from this home,
would they? ’ thought Juha to himself, and for
the first time for long plans for the future began
to form in his mind. Winter was over too. . . .

The next time Juha worked on the farm he
had so much to say while he worked that the
master uttered a curse.

“Hold your tongue!” he snapped; “I’m
the man who says what there is to say here.”

“ We’ll see about that,” Juha retorted in a
lower voice.

And now it was to be seen, for on this May
morning Juha is not going to work, but to
Rinne’s place. The strike epidemic has spread
to this parish. The dairy has been permitted
to go on working so far, but now a stop is going

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223

to be put to that as well. The day will show
whether any of the farmers are thinking of
showing fight.

Juha walks as though he w T as on the way to
church, feeling at his best both inside and out.
A masculine feeling of security fills his bosom.
When he reaches the open village lands and calls
to mind the owners of the various fields he cannot
help smiling. He was here yesterday with a lot
of other men staring out the blacklegs, and to-day
the fields wear a different aspect. Formerly
the sight of growing crops aroused in his mind
pictures of the master and his locked granaries;
now it only reminds him of what the workers
have planned to do to-day. The wealth of
the open lands is like the common wealth of
mankind.

Juha’s own master w r as out on the lake trying
his nets when he saw Juha emerge from the forest
track. The distance between them was big
enough to allow the master freely to stare after
that old fellow, whom he knows too well for his
own liking. The fellow is so old, so poor and so
settled in his ignorance and brainlessness, that
the hate the master cannot help feeling for him
is unpalatable even as he admits its existence.
He cannot help hating, yet at the same time he
senses something touchingly hopeless in the
seriousness of the man. The present unrest,
the murmur of which seems to pulse in the air,

MEEK HERITAGE

224

is another matter; grave enough to awaken
anxiety, yet fraught with something before which
the deepest, loneliest soul of a man is helpless
and secretly inclined to submission. At odd
moments the master has felt the desire to sur¬
render to the mighty subterranean current,
but when his eye falls on the tangled beard
and stupid, pricking eyes of a disgusting old
fellow like Juha, his stomach turns and he knows
hate, the hate that springs from a conflict of
one’s own making.

Everywhere similar private little decisions
are welling up in people’s minds and uniting to
form the tense pressure of those revolutionary
days. That pressure comes to a head and finds
vent in incidents like that which is now taking
place in the dairy yard. Cries fill the air there
and are succeeded by a defiant speech; in the
bigger crowd one sees tightened chins and
glances; in the smaller opposing group, furious
looks. The crowd remains in the yard until
noon and then scatters; the show is over for the
day in this neighbourhood. In the evening
the events of the day are debated in many
dwellings. No one bothers any longer to argue
about right or wrong; men are content to de¬
scribe to one another with a curious feverish
liveliness the actions and methods of the other
side. When night falls the farmers carefully
lock their doors and settle down to sleep in their

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225

board-lined and painted houses. Over their
long files of rooms still hovers the old assurance
of peace in the home.

But on the highway and in the village lanes
shadowy figures are in movement. Cigarettes
glow and sometimes a roar of laughter breaks
out. Three farm-maids come strolling along the
road, all three with white kerchiefs on their
heads that glow softly in the night. A party
of men join them, and they all go together into a
tiny shack where lemonade and cakes used to
be sold. There are over a dozen of them, and
no patriot could ever divine what thoughts pass
between them.

So much for that gang. Juha Toivola knows
nothing of their doings. He has fussed around
all day, and in the evening dragged himself
wearily into his woods. In his mind there
is now no room for doubts or hair-splitting;
these last few days he has given up “ prophesy¬
ing.” He sees only the farmers and the re¬
sistance put up by them. That makes the situa¬
tion clear and whole; it is all in harmony
with the billowing spirit of the times. Old Juha
was filled with the revolutionary fever that
summer.

And the Revolution goes on, swelling with a
sense of its own importance. Every morning the
mail brings newspapers which tell of the growth
of the movement throughout the country, from
Q

MEEK HERITAGE

226

Helsinki upward. The fairest summer of the
Finnish proletariat is dawning. Weeks come
when not a flutter is to be seen anywhere of the
capitalist newspapers which always lie and distort
the facts in their attempts to combat the truth
of the workers’ movement. On the harvest-
field nobody takes any notice when the master
tries to set an example and in a fury erects the
shocks on three whole plots unaided. It is
almost a pleasure to watch his helpless rage while
the men sit around for hours whetting and testing
their sickles. The former competitions between
man and man to see who reached the end of a
plot first are forgotten. The summer of the
proletariat in Finland—1917. Free, head proudly
erect, the young labourer sauntered along the
summery lanes; the crofter felt a new affection
for his fields, from which breathed an inspiring
promise. . . .

Yet in every phase of every stratum of the
Finnish people everything turns mostly to tragedy,
a strange thin tragedy. Fate, instead of exter¬
minating the nation, has subjected it to slow
torture. It lets the sun emerge, but no sooner
are we so intoxicated with our good fortune that
we are at a loss whom to embrace than it hastens
to reveal that it was only playing with us.

Winter had come; January. Snowstorms,
frosts, bright starlit nights when time seems to

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227

have stopped and to be listening in the silent
forests back through the decades, and the thud
of snow falling from a branch is like a deep
unintentional sigh in an hour of devotion. In
this form winter has returned again and again
for generations, and along the narrow winter
tracks people have moved whose deepest instinct
has been attuned to that devout stillness.

So it has been; not now.

Few have time even to notice that winter has
come; why, only yesterday it was November,
when the Butcher Guards were scattered. The
taxpayers’ strike is only three weeks old—and
now the slogan is, £ not a stiver to the Church
either.’ An old crofter cannot sit quiet at home
in times like these. At home, in the lonely cabin,
the sluggish stillness of former times seems to lie
in wait on grey days, and who could revert to
that now? Instinctively one flees from silence.
What is going to happen in Parliament? Are
the capitalists going to legalize the Butcher
Guards? Then it is time we lads rose as well.
What, after all, is Parliament? We lost the
elections—well, what then?—we lost, by God,
what about it? Parliament is an old woman’s
game; the bourgeoisie always hampering us
there, lose or win. No matter how large a
majority the workers might have there, it makes
no difference so long as there are capitalists
and the storehouse keys hang on their walls.

MEEK HERITAGE

228

Parliament and majorities mean nothing to us.
We’ll give them majority. If it comes to a pinch,
there’s more of us.

As when a proper fellow at a name-day
dance begins to feel his gorge rise at the sight
of coffee-tables and other sickening finickinesses
—he gives a yell and hits out.

Juha Toivola no longer has as many house¬
hold cares as before; Lempi is fourteen and able
to look after the cow, especially now that it is
not milking. Ten years have thus gone by since
that death-summer, when Juha paid his visit to
his relatives at Tuorila. It was one of those old-
fashioned summers of endless sizzling heat.
Juha no longer thinks about his dead and his
relatives; they have nothing to do with the
present. The crofter problem is now to the fore;
that and the Butcher Guards.

Juha sits in houses where he is known and
preaches in a squeaky voice. In the evenings
he goes home, yawns and thinks of hardly any¬
thing at all. The room with its beds and rags
has acquired a new aspect with the passage of
time. Poverty formerly dwelt here, but poverty
has now given way to a vague, but real destitu¬
tion ; the old atmosphere of a home has evapor¬
ated from the elements that compose it, and the
room now calls to mind the living-room of a
big farm after a bunch of tramps temporarily
taken on to work have gone, leaving behind them

THE REBEL 22Q

a coarse humourless lewdness vibrating in the
air.

One might believe this new aspect of misery
to be an illusion only, were it not for the fact
that visible witnesses testify to its reality—lice.
There are now lice in the Toivola beds. And
pensive night-thoughts forsake the bed where
there are lice. The louse is not anunconscientious
or an accidental visitor; nor is its well-being
contingent on dirt. It may keep away from the
most dilapidated shack, but it invariably spreads
slowly and surely where humanity, in the abstract
sense of the word, trembles on the verge of
extinction, as in front-line trenches, labour
barracks and other places where workers are
deposited.

At Toivola both want and misery now reign.
When autumn came Juha was refused admittance
to the farm-households, members of which are
entitled to the special rations allowed to grain-
growers. He has to fetch the small ration which
his bread-card entitles him to buy from the
church village. Thus for days at a time the
family goes hungry, with potatoes and the brine-
water from pickled sprats as sole diet. Lempi
and Martti mostly feast on these by themselves,
for Juha is nearly always away; often even
nights. Those two thin-necked hollow-eyed
beings have managed to survive. Grey and slow
of movement they crouch under their comfortless

MEEK HERITAGE

230

rags, two images of misery personified. They
attend no school, not even the school of life.

Juha likes best to be in the village, away from
home. He is continually whispering in the ear
of now this “ comrade ” now that—he is forced
to beg for small loans. Rinne—who knows what
that man is? An impenetrable fellow, a sly
and cunning agitator—does old Toivola a good
turn now and then on the quiet. He lets Juha
do little jobs for the union, jobs Juha can be
trusted to carry out, and presses a few marks
into his hand in reward. Rinne is much in
demand, still working together with the bour¬
geoisie on the many boards of which he is a
member. His brows are always puckered in a
frown; he opens his mouth only to give curt
explanations. He merely smiles when Juha
starts preaching on any subject. Nevertheless,
Rinne is a better man than any farmer.

But when a man’s affairs are in a bad state,
they often get worse and are finally at their
worst. One Wednesday the situation at Toivola
is such that there has been no bread in the house
for the last twenty-four hours, not a wisp of hay
is left for the cow, and Juha can think of no way
out of his difficulties. The cow will be calving
in five weeks time, and it is a pity to feed her only
on alder-shoots. Yet it is not easy to go and beg
from Rinne again so soon. And where is
Rinne to find hay for the cow? The children

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231

dip their potatoes in brine-water and swallow
in heavy gulps. At last Juha makes up his mind
to go to the village; he would drop in at Rhine’s,
but say nothing about his plight. The children
begin sobbing softly, guessing that father would
be away all night, going off at this late hour.

Old Toivola drew near to Rinne’s house with a
sensation of being about to call on his betters—
the past few weeks had brought out in Juha the
trait of character that once sent him to Tuorila.
But when he set foot in Rinne’s living-room
he realized at once that his visit was ill-timed.
Rinne was too busy to bother with him. Rinne’s
voice could be heard from the parlour; there
were several other men there, and by the sound
of their voices one could guess that they had not
assembled to talk about the weather, and not
assembled casually. Rinne’s wife took in a tray
with coffee, and Rinne popped out to see who
the newcomer was. He gave a well-simulated
friendly answer to Juha’s greeting and went
back into the parlour.

When Rinne’s wife came out, she said to Juha:
“ Now then, Toivola, why don’t you go into the
parlour? A lot of the others are there.”
cc Do you think I might? ”

“ Why not—I suppose Toivola can come in,
can’t he? ” she shouted through the door. The
answer was unintelligible, but she said, “Go
on in.”

MEEK HERITAGE

232

Juha went into the parlour and sat down beside
the door. He had the same feeling as when a
farmer had happened to invite him to the house-
side. Here too were cigarettes and coffee-cups,
tablecloths on the tables and pictures on the
walls. Juha had no idea why all the workers’
leaders were assembled in such style on a week¬
day, in their best clothes and high-shafted top-
boots. Must be a special kind of meeting.

Juha ought not really to have been sitting there
like that. It would have been a different ma tter
if there had been bread and hay at home. He
tried uneasily to put in a word now and again,
though he had no clear idea what the discussion
was about. Something about the ridge at
Kuuskoski, what it is like at various points along
its length. Juha knows the ridge as well as
anybody.

“ It’s an easy place to defend,” he remarked.
“ Shall we be needing it for that sort of thing? ”

“ Who knows how soon we shall be needing it,”
one of the men answered.

And gradually, by venturing a question on
every suitable occasion, Juha found out what had
happened. War had broken out. War—no one
utters the word; it is like an all too overwhelming
sum total of certain preceding factors. War—
is it a real war if the Red Guards and the Butchers
clash ? Will it not rather be something like that
which happened in the dairy yard in the summer,

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233

a demonstration ? No one can do anything to a
demonstration, the demonstrators are so many.
It seems too fantastic to think that anyone could
start firing on such a crowd.

More men arrived in the living-room, and
Rinne went out to meet them. While he was
away Juha tried to find out what the others
think of the turn events have taken, speaking in a
whisper as though he had been afraid to speak
while Rinne was in the room. Juha’s affairs are
in a bad state at home; how is this going to
affect them ?

Six men have arrived in the living-room; Juha
caught a glimpse of shot-guns. Up to now the
meeting in the parlour had been the centre of
things; it now broke up. There was a general
move to the living-room, where among those
present are a few of the village roughs. Some of
them have been in prison, and hitherto Juha has
instinctively regarded them as men unfit for any
serious purposes. But now there is an uplifted
spirit in the air that makes any such distinctions
invidious. The cigarette-smoke grows thicker.
The moment is all that matters now; there is
no yesterday and no to-morrow. Every time
even a couple of men arrive the mass-spirit
seems to double in strength. Sentry duties are
already being planned for the night. Quite as a
matter of course, uninvited, Juha spends the night
in the house. The afternoon, when he left his

MEEK HERITAGE

234

cabin because there was neither bread nor hay,
is far distant. The other men have all had
similar matters to think about only a little while
ago. But not now.

The “ Red reign ” in the locality has begun.
In the morning men already form up in ranks in
Rinne’s yard before going off in different direc¬
tions to confiscate arms. By the evening the first
requisition order has been served on a farmer;
he brings a load of hay—to the barracks; the
word has suddenly come into use. Men return
from their search for arms; in such numbers
that no one can remember when all of them came.
A buzz of talk fills the smoke-enwrapped room;
the men describe to each other what happened
at each of the farms visited. Among the men are
toughs whom Juha has never set eyes on before.
Rinne is in the parlour with the same men as
yesterday; they are the Staff. The barracks
and the Staff—around these stretches the rest of
the village, looking curiously estranged. Over
yonder is Toikka’s farm, yonder Paitula. What
has happened in the church village?

Juha has one private little nightmare to in¬
commode him; it is more than twenty-four hours
since he left home. The surrounding din makes
him unusually perceptive. He grasps that he
had better not go home yet this evening either.
As he eats his buttered bread and soup he tries
to solve the problem: will the children and the

THE REBEL 235

cow be able to hold out another day? This
evening and the coming night?

However rapidly an avalanche may grow, it
needs its own time. And for success in that for
which Juha is now waiting the avalanche will
have to swell to considerable proportions. The
third day was almost at an end before Juha’s
hopes were realized.

On that day one heard everywhere, hummed,
whistled, bawled, piped by children and screeched
by women, from the rows of sleighs passing along
the road, from lanes and farm-yards—

“ Against the yoke of tyranny
From the earth an army rises.”

And on that day one knew what it was to rule and
tasted the sensation of liberty. The sensation
of being free ran in cold shudders up and down old
Juha’s spine, his thin voice quavered as he tried
to sing, when after agonized waiting his own
private liberation came; when a load of hay went
ski mmin g along the forest track to Toivola and
Juha himself bore a heavy load of food from
Rinne’s to the children, who were half-dead with
hunger and weeping. At last Juha could devote
himself wholly to the cause of a greater, ideal
liberty.

By that time matters had already reached a
settled stage. The following night Juha met his
son Kalle, a stout red-faced town cabby, now in

MEEK HERITAGE

236

command of a company. No father and son
relation showed itself in their encounter; a con¬
dition for that was lacking: a gruff paternal
authority on Juha’s part. Kalle spoke to him
as to any other man. The next morning he set
off with his men in the direction of Kuuskoski.

Rumours were already current: such-and-such
a great gentleman was no longer among the
living. But such matters were not much dis¬
cussed. One discussed the affairs of the local
farmers and, to pass the time, subjected the
character of each of them to a searching analysis.
To-morrow it will be a full week since this
started. Life in the neighbourhood had been
violently dislocated during those first few days,
but the dislocation soon became the normal state
of things. The new situation had no particular
name among the local people; it was what it
was. One was shy about mentioning many of
its details. Not until the Whites arrived did
many learn that this was rebellion and the
Finnish War of Independence.

The war has already lasted seven weeks. In
many lukewarm hearts the high excitement of
its early days has had time to fade; requisition¬
ings of horses and food, permits to move about,
all that had become customary and people were
only mildly alarmed when a sleigh drove up to
the house and they saw the familiar rifle-barrels

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237

with their cleaning-rods and red rosettes. Such
callers were received with friendly smiles and
promises to fulfil the orders they brought; old
acquaintances from one’s own parish—why not?
And there goes the sleigh again down the yard.
Soon the men from the front will be here for the
milk.

Life is almost monotonous. In the twilight
one visits neighbours, sits in living-rooms and
chats about what one had seen while driving
here and there by command of the Reds or one
repeats what Reds from other localities have said.
One speaks of everything with a smile on one’s
lips and tries to keep on good terms with every¬
body.

One doubts whether the Butchers—no one uses
any other term for the other side—will ever
advance so far as this. Here a farmer has been
given cigarettes while acting as coachman; he is
now able to treat others to a smoke. Someone
remarks that the master of Paitula is under
orders to report to Rinne four times a day;
nobody’s business, that. Someone outside of it
all even thinks to himself that a taste of humble
pie will do the man good. A man says he has
heard that Rinne’s son has been killed; the same
outsider feels almost grateful that the young
hooligan is gone for good. The outsider believes
he can see all the different chains of events that
have led to the present situation. The times are

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238

a source of secret satisfaction to him, for nothing
is happening except what had to happen; the
only thing that troubles him is a mild impatience.
Get through with it quicker! He knows that
neither side is capable of victory. The first
condition for that is victory over one’s own self.

So run the thoughts of one secretly outside of
it all and careful not to disclose himself; and now
he feels in his nerves that events are moving.
Life abhors a long monotony. Life is in general
inclined to be passionate.

In the general hubbub Juha Toivola has con¬
tinued to fuss about where anything is doing.
The whole of this time he has been seen around
here with his red ribbons and staring eyes.
Many a farmer who had previously not even paid
Juha the compliment of classing him with those
Socialists, has had to take orders from Juha.
Juha likes to be present on every important
occasion, his eyes starting out of his head, his
mouth grimly pursed. He also likes to be sent
to commandeer necessities, although his own
master once sent word to the Staff asking whether
they hadn’t a better man to send than Toivola.
Many a man would rather give up half his land
t han be under orders from the likes of Juha.
For some mysterious reason Juha is specially
obnoxious to the farmers and the object of their
hate.

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239

Juha, on his part, does not feel any great hate
for the fanners. All he wants is that they should
admit what he has always said: that the People
are almighty and that living on another man’s
sweat will have to stop. They wouldn’t listen to
him before, and when he went into their kitchens
would often not even as much as ask him to sit
down. However politely he has addressed them,
they have grunted and turned their attention
elsewhere. Even now, with the war on, Juha
has noticed that they have been boiling over with
rage inside when he brought them their orders.

That is what it has all been like for Juha.
To-day, more than one secret listener on the
telephone has begun to suspect what may be
happening shortly, but Juha—he still drives about
the parish with Kalle Nieminen commandeering
rugs. Juha’s shrunken brains have felt no need
to keep informed about the situation. He has so
far been able to save well over five hundred marks.
Not so bad, though nothing like what he thought
he would get when things were put right. For
although he knows that he will now get the cabin
and fields for his own, and a bit of forest as well,
he needs a good deal more money. He is even
beginning to be a bit impatient. He has worked
hard doing his bit and means to go on working,
but results are slow in coming. Rinne, too, is
maybe looking out for himself, with all that
money passing through his hands.

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240

He hints something of the sort to Kalle Nie-
minen, who sits beside him in the sleigh. But
Kalle listens with one ear only, answers in a bored
tone, hums and stares ahead. Never, never in
the whole of his life has Juha been able to find
a real comrade. . . .

Dusk had fallen when Juha arrived with the
plunder at Staff Headquarters. He marched
into the house, his hairy face in a solemn, pre¬
occupied frown; he is an old man, but here he
is, about and active—a rare state things would be
in if everybody were to take it easy in the house.
A man has to be up and doing when the times
call for action. It is only as it should be when
Rinne’s wife invites him into the kitchen for a
drop of coffee.

When Juha laps his coffee and lets a sense of
luxury steal over him as at present, his mood is
usually the same as in former days after he had
been paid for some job or other, and the money,
all the while he was sipping his coffee, agreeably
exercised his thoughts. The fascination of a
steady settled activity tickles and worries him in
equal parts. He feels secure in his surroundings;
men always around him, warmth, food, coffee,
movement. Someone always going off some¬
where, the telephone busy and everything gliding
along smoothly. Has anyone thought of bringing
wood into the kitchen ? No, the pile seems to be
running low—I’ll have to fetch some.

THE REBEL

24I

The rumble that has been sounding for weeks
from the front at Kuuskoski is also a familiar and
snug noise by now; it belongs to the situation,
without it life wouldn’t be what it is. The long
files of hundreds of sleighs down on the ice seem
to move of their own accord, needing no boss to
tell them where to go; sometimes word comes
that so-and-so from these parts has fallen, and,
curiously, the news only adds to the sense of
security. Juha does not even want to be a
farmer; he is comfortable like this. Juha as
it were cloaks himself in the bustle of the con¬
tinuous activity; nothing could be more un¬
natural than that his brains should seek to work
out the significance and consequences of the
situation. He feels all right as he is, and in any
case he imagines himself to be safely hidden in
the crowd, come what may. For what does he
signify among all these thousands that anybody
should specially single him out? He goes to
fetch wood for the kitchen.

Juha is a hustler and the members of the Staff
invariably eye him and speak to him with an
approving smile. Juha is aware of this and
accepts their approval with a show of gruffness.
This very minute, only just back from a round of
the parish, he is fetching wood. In the living-
room other men sprawl on the beds; one man
sits in the rocking-chair reading a newspaper.

Yet this evening Juha cannot help stealing

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242

inquisitive glances at the members of the Staff-
for some reason he is haunted by a dreadful
suspicion that their calmness is assumed. It
began already when he returned from com¬
mandeering those rugs. The telephone, taken
from one of the farms, seemed to look down from
the wall with a wooden expression; from the
ceiling hung the electric lamp installed there
“ by order.” Nobody took the slightest notice
of his helpfulness. Indeed, one might almost
have thought that they had had enough of his
eternal fussing. As he went out the thought
flashed into Juha’s mind that this new life had
now lasted seven weeks.

And nothing has really changed. The evening
is calm, even the firing at Kuuskoski has quietened
down a little. Still hanging on there, the
Butchers. ... A sentinel stands at the gate.
From the road comes the sound of footsteps;
two people are approaching. One is a man, the
other a woman; both wear good fur coats and
both are silent. There they go, gentlefolk, the
master of Paitula reporting at headquarters,
accompanied as usual by his wife. The firing
at Kuuskoski becomes more and more desultory.
Is anything special happening? There is such
a funny feeling in the air.

Juha went into the shed and dispiritedly
gathered an armful of wood. What is all this?
He stopped in the middle of a movement and

THE REBEL 243

stared into the darkness: this is Revolution and
I am a revolutionary. It had been pleasant to
mutter that to oneself when it all began, but now
it seemed to hold meanings too deep for Juha to
penetrate. If we could all go back to the old
order now; I have saved well over five hundred
marks, and that’s something to the good. A
dreadful feeling that there is no more going back
for him overwhelms Juha. The master of Paitula
has vanished into the house and the silence
around Juha is unbroken.

When Juha returns to the house with his load
the master of Paitula is standing in the living-
room near the door; he stands in his usual
haughty gentleman’s attitude, his face is dark
red, his jaw is thrust out. Rinne is questioning
him again. As Juha passes with his load behind
the gentleman’s back he hears him answer Rinne
in a violent tone and with a self-conscious jerk
of his body. Juha takes the wood into the
kitchen, comes back into the living-room and in
reply to the gentleman’s recent remark says:

“ Capital’s been oppressing the poor people’s
liberty so long that it’s neither here nor there
if one gent has to use his legs a little.”

Juha’s words break in on the genuine suspense
of the moment with the effect of a tactless inter¬
ruption by a poor relative. Rinne is seated on
one of the beds with his elbows on his knees, a
cigarette between his fingers; he gives a grimace

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244

as though to say to the gentleman: you think we
depend on the likes of Juha, but if you do, you’re
mistaken. Aloud he says to the master of
Paitula with an impatient movement:

“ Well, there’s no need for you to come any
more, if you think it healthier not to. You can

go-”

“ Good,” answered the gentleman, and turning
he left the room. Rinne too got up from the
bed and went out. The men left in the living-
room were silent, each in the attitude he had
assumed a while ago. Only Juha tried to say
something, but nobody heeded him. The tele¬
phone rang. Lahteenmaki got up to answer.

“ Halloo—yes—no, it’s not him—I couldn’t
say, he went out a couple of minutes ago—what’s
that?—haven’t the Turku men?—what? gone!
Where?—that’s the Devil’s own lie-”

Lahteenmaki hung up the receiver, but made
no remark.

“ I feared as much,” said Makinen.

Juha was vaguely uneasy, though he hadn’t
understood what the call was about. Rinne came
in.

“ You go, Toivola, and keep an eye on that
Butcher. See he doesn’t leave his lair.”

“ What Butcher? ”

“ The one that just left here. Any telephone
message ? ” Rinne asked, turning to the others.

“ Yes.”

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245

“ Shall I take my rifle ? ” asked Juha.

“ Of course,” answered Rinne with a curiously
loud laugh.

Juha Toivola is leaving Rinne’s house for the
last time, though he does not know it yet. The
span of sixty years that began on a night round
about Michaelmas so far back in the past that it
is hard to imagine any living link between that
night and these warlike times, is drawing to a
close. In that past, splint-torches flickered and
old Penjami Nikkila in his burlap smock spent his
days drunk with home-made spirits, beat his
third wife and ruled over his household, and
between Heaven and earth reigned a deep
country peace. The boy born in those times—
all the other members of the household have
gone to their eternal rest—has become the
Socialist who walks yonder along the road. His
brains are of the simplest, the horizon of his mind
the narrowest conceivable, and yet he has sur¬
vived through the sixty years which we know to
have been the most eventful, the richest in
development, in the history of his people.

As he stalks there along the dark wintry road,
with his beard, his staring eyes and his rifle, one
can almost see perched on his lean shoulders the
puckish spirit of human progress; tongue in
cheek, jerking and hopping, it urges old Juha
Toivola onward. And seen in this fashion Juha
is by no means a repulsive individual, rather does

MEEK HERITAGE

1246

he arouse in the beholder a half-humorous
sympathy. For how often has not the same imp
grinned gleefully from the shoulders of many
who tread their path with broad brows furrowed
with deep lines of wisdom?

A sense of lonely helplessness was uppermost in
Juha’s mind as he strode on towards Paitula.
Important events are brewing on this eve of
St. Mary’s Day, though Juha has no clear inkling
of the direction they are to take. All he suspects
is that he has been sent on an errand no one else
would be bothered with, and he feels that he is
being badly rewarded for all his wood-carrying
and helpfulness.

That, however, has been his fate all his life
long; it is something neither Juha nor anyone
else can help. To be spurned by others and to
find out that whatever efforts he has made, he
has always, as it were, chosen the wrong moment;
that is Juha’s fate. Other men rise and fall in
the world in a natural manner; even their mis¬
fortunes are of a kind to be taken seriously.
Whereas Juha, in all his good and bad luck alike
there is always the same leaven of poor taste.

This present money-getting, too, and his rising
prosperity in general—it still remains to be seen
whether any good will come of it. . . . When his
wife died a wave of harmony had welled up inside
him. He felt then that he was being kind to the
children and was confident that his life would

THE REBEL

247

thereafter proceed smoothly from that new start.
He planned in his mind how this and that was
bound to be easy now that the mother had left
them. And things did really seem to be shaping
well; a specially promising omen was the luck
his girl had in finding employment with real
full-blooded gentlefolk. Juha felt such an access
of strength at that time that it was not at all hard
for him to go about with a ten-mark note in his
pocket for a week without wanting to spend it.

What Juha specially remembers about those
days is, curiously enough, that the moon shone
with unusual brightness. . . . It was the brightest
time of Juha’s life as well. But then when the
girl died like that, everything crashed to its
former level, and Juha awoke to the old familiar
life, full from morning to eve with one thing and
another, but never satisfying. Juha had to find
something to occupy himself with, something
which, although it was only a kind of stuffing and
with a touch of absurdity at that, like dressing up
in a white collar, had to be if he was to escape
t/eing looked down on as a simpleton. As
stuffing there appeared this C£ temocrat ” business,
which was then being preached in so many
living-rooms as before that “ this matter of
salvation ” had been preached.

Juha had crossed the ice and reached the
Paitula yard-gate. The house was silent and

MEEK HERITAGE

248

dark. Across the channel the lights of Rinne’s
headquarters twinkled, and farther away two
big carbon lamps cast a glow over the church
village. From the same direction came a steady
thin crackle from Kuuskoski; a single sleigh was
climbing the slope towards Paitula. It drew
nearer and Juha distinguished rifle-barrels and
two turned-up fur collars.

“ Who goes there? ” Juha asked gruffly.

No answer came from the depths of the fur-
collars and the horse broke into a trot.

A whole hour then passed, during which Juha
saw nobody; the stars only winked mysteriously
and the fitful crackle from afar was like the stern
voice of this solemn night. Juha could look about
him in peace and try to picture the life led by the
gentleman, that incomprehensible being. The
brains, riches and habits of the master of Paitula—
Juha seemed to see them before him and was
nearly angry at the contradiction he seemed to
see in them. He tried to remember the occasions
on which he had come into contact with the
fellow.

The proletariat and the master of Paitula—
how helpless a gentleman like him is in the face
of the people! On the one hand the master’s
brains and schemes, for he too wanted to get on
in the world—on the other the brains of the
proletariat. The gentleman’s brains skulk in
the parlour yonder, whereas the proletariat’s

THE REBEL 249

brains surge as it were from one end of the world
to the other.

Sleighs were coming his way again. There
must be a long row of them, to judge from the
sound. What sleighs can they be, coming in
such numbers from that direction ?

When the leading sleighs were abreast of Juha,
a voice demanded roughly:

“ Hey you, old fellow, have two men driven
past here? ”

“ Two went past here an hour ago.”

“ Hell’s traitors—why didn’t you stop them? ”
Three or four sleighs pass, and again Juha was
hailed.

“ Hey, old man, did two officers come this
way? ”

“ Yes, I saw them.”

“ How long ago was that? ”

“ About an hour.”

Hard-driven horses continued to pass. In the
sleighs five or six, sometimes as many as eight
men were crowded. Women sat in the men s
laps.

From one sleigh came a shout: “ Clear out,
old man, the front’s busted! ”

But the exhortation had no effect on Juha—
he was in the grip of a stronger mass-suggestion.
Similar cries and questions continued to be
hurled at him.

MEEK. HERITAGE

250

“ Got a Butcher rounded up there, or what
are you squatting there for? ”

Juha ought to be aware by now that the files
of sleighs spell retreat; perhaps in his subcon¬
scious mind he understood. But uppermost is a
feeling of high excitement. Seeing a throng of
this size it seemed to be a trifling matter whether
they were retreating or advancing. As a solemn
exultation spread through his soul even his
fundamental spite against life seemed to dis¬
solve ; his lips babbled as his mind unconsciously
groped for words to express his feeling: c prole¬
tariat—government by the people—armies—ours
is the victory- 5

But no sooner had the last sleigh vanished than
Juha was beset by doubts. Before long he was
nakedly afraid. The dark masses of the Paitula
buildings and the rim of forest behind have
quelled him; they are on the master’s side, and
Juha is all alone on the dark road. Even
Rinne’s lights twinkle coldly with an air of dis¬
claiming any acquaintance with him. Some¬
where inside those dark buildings is the gentle¬
man. If he were now to charge out, Juha would
be powerless to stop him. Juha seemed to have
become secretly endowed with the power of see¬
ing the gentleman’s thoughts at work inside the
house, and at the moment he could think of
nothing in the whole parish that could come up

THE REBEL 251

to the gentleman in importance—the gentleman
and Juha, face to face.

A vague sense of grievance seized Juha as he
saw the secret quick working of the master of
Paitula’s brains. He had the kind of gentle¬
man’s head that was always too much for you;
kill him and that head would still be on his
body, and the killer would only feel that he had
been bested after all. It was just such gentle¬
men’s heads—Juha seemed to see a whole row
of them, as on a platform—they, and nothing
else, that made the poor feel they were being
made a mock of. . . . At this point Juha sud¬
denly became aware that the firing at Kuuskoski
had long ago ceased. Such a crowd had come
from that direction a while ago that there could
be no one left there now. Juha was unable to
picture that there might be Butchers there; no,
only a dreadful emptiness that crushed and
swallowed him up. And only a few yards away
was the master of Paitula’s head. Now, Juha
realized, he was really alone; the emptiness and
the gentleman’s head were in league against
him, they had sprung a surprise on him and
were laughing. The lights at Rinne’s shone
lifeless.

Juha set off at a walk towards the shore,
though he knew quite well that he would not
dare to go away anywhere alone. He daren’t

MEEK HERITAGE

252

even go to Rinne’s; he will have to stay here
until morning. Whatever is happening, he is
safest here in the shadow of the house.

Again the creak of a sleigh from the shore. A
solitary sleigh toils up the bank. A sudden
panic seizes Juha. His recent fancies seem to
shout to him as they flee that the sleigh betokens
danger for him—it’s for you it’s coming! The
sleighs that passed here earlier are far away by
now. Juha is wholly in the power of the new¬
comers. They too are armed with rifles.

The sleigh turns towards the gate. Juha hears
a whisper: “ There the old bastard is,” and the
sleigh stops. Juha’s heart begins to thump; his
mind hastens to create a solid conviction that he
has never harmed anybody, not a soul. The
men stand up and one of them says shortly,
“ Assassination.” Juha hears the word, but
can make no sense of it; his knees quake. The
man repeats in a louder tone, “ Assassination.”

“ Yes—eh, what assassin—assass-? ” stam¬

mers Juha.

c< What the hell kind of a sentry are you, not
knowing the password?”

But the man spoke so rapidly that Juha failed
to understand what he said. He could only
take a step towards the man and say in as in¬
gratiating a tone as he could muster, “ Eh,
what? ”

THE REBEL 253

“ Who sent you here? ” the stranger de¬
manded.

“ Rinne told me to come,” Juha answered in
the tone of one answering an accusation.

“ Well, stop here then and hold the horse.”

The strangers were handsome men, almost
gentlemanlike in appearance. One had remark¬
ably fine features and long and very curly hair
escaping from under his cap. He kept silent
and let the others do the talking. One of the
men strode up to the house door and knocked.
Complete silence followed the sound. He
knocked again, and immediately the door swung
defiantly wide open. Two of the men went in,
leaving the long-haired, pretty-faced man out¬
side. Juha would greatly have liked to go up
to him and say a friendly word or two, a hearty
comradely word, but was afraid to do so. Best
stay at the gate—he had never done anybody
any harm. Oh, he’ll look faithfully after the
horse all right—they’re sure to be coming out
soon—and likely as not they’d take the gentle¬
man with them. Juha began to feel easier in
his mind—he had never done anybody any
harm.

The door swung open with a crash and the
gentleman came out followed by the two men.
The gentleman’s movements were quick and
sure, as though he knew where he had to go;

MEEK HERITAGE

254

he came towards Juha, but did not look at him ,
One of the two men steered the gentleman with
his rifle to the driver’s perch in front of the
sleigh. The pretty-faced man kept a little to
one side. And when the gentleman had gathered
up the reins and the other two had seated them¬
selves in the sleigh, he jumped on to the sleigh-
runners behind. The party drove off down the
bank in the direction from which the sleigh had
come.

Juha felt such a sense of relief that he could
have sat down in the snow. Nothing had
happened to him, and nothing was going to
happen to him. The master of Paitula had been
taken away, but Juha had not been taken, but
left in peace. Those fellows cursed him for not
knowing the password; a good thing he hadn’t
known it, for that left him outside of it all.
Now that the gentleman had gone, it was as
though the whole house had been given into
Juha’s care; he felt secure and comfortable
again. He would stay where he was until he
saw what was going to happen—there was still
no sound from Kuuskoski.

But what are they up to now down there on
the shore? The sleigh had come to a halt
words, angry words rang out and then a shot.
A second shot, and then only a faint muttering.
Someone was trying to soothe the startled horse.
Juha’s knees wobbled, his mind was a blank,

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255

but he could feel a strange, stern gentleman’s
head take possession of the building behind his
back and breathe heavily in his direction. And
beside that head, excitedly bobbing up and
down, was the mistress’s head. And inside
Juha, in the part of him where a voice kept on
repeating only a little while ago that he had
never harmed anybody, there was now silence.

The sleigh, driven at a gallop, topped the
bank; in it are the three strangers. They skim
past the house without a word. Dazed with
terror and a sense of his own helplessness, Juha
was turning to run after them when he heard a
second sleigh approaching and a voice cry,
“ Stop!”

A man and a woman jumped out of the sleigh.
The man came quickly towards Juha.

“ Who are you? ”

“ I’m Johan Toivola—Rinne sent me here.
I’ve never done anybody any harm.”

“ Don’t jaw! Stand here and hold the horse.
If anyone comes—shoot! ”

The man and the woman hastened into the
house by the same entrance through which the
master had been brought out only a few minutes
earlier. Juha would have liked to follow them
in; he was terrified at being left alone, even
with the horse beside' him to hold. Auto¬
matically he stroked the horse’s mane and
adjusted its collar, but all his senses were strained

MEEK HERITAGE

256

outward towards the pregnant dark night. The
present had fallen away from him; what was
left was the being a man becomes when a flash
of lightning strikes down quite close to him.

That was the night the front collapsed at
Kuuskoski and the victor’s forces began to pour
into this parish. At one o’clock stray shots
began to be heard as the victors fired on rebels
who had stayed behind in the surroundings of
Kuuskoski. These stragglers were the gentlest
lot one could wish to meet, entirely ignorant that
there had been any hostilities; they gave them¬
selves up to the strange delusion that nothing
would befall them, that in all this confusion no
one would take any notice of them. That was
bad for them, for few prisoners were taken at
Kuuskoski. Fail to give the countersign and
you were shot, and in the hurry many an inno¬
cent man may have met his death. But by then
Juha Toivola was already toiling homeward
along the narrow fence-side track deep in the
forest. The trees on either side helped to tone
down the horrors he had been through in the
open village lands. This spruce-lined track had
never moved with the times, but was part of the
old life, and anyone who had been in a position
secretly to observe the expressions in Juha’s eyes
as he came along this part of his road would

THE REBEL 257

often have had cause to smile during the course
of years.

Old Juha has now definitively emerged from
his revolutionary mood. The dulled rattle of
rifle-shots do not engage his attention in the
slightest; he is in the shelter of the forest, deeper
in the woods is his wretched familiar home.
And he has a strong conviction that he will have
no other desire for the rest of his life than to
live alone. And now that he has managed to
get this far from the tight places he was in a
while ago, his life will surely henceforward pro¬
ceed undisturbed. What a blessing that he has
never done any harm to anybody.

While the looters were still in the main build¬
ing on the Paitula estate, the first spearhead of a
disorderly rabble began to show on the ice,
spreading even in the dark its own raw atmo¬
sphere of despair and dejection. Only then did
Juha consciously realize what was happening,
and the realization set him bucking ludicrously
like a sheep suddenly cut off from the flock.
For the flock that now streamed towards him
was not his, he had nothing in common with
those people; they lacked that consciousness of
security which Juha demanded of his company.
The stock of his rifle began to bum his hand;
the rout would soon be on him and the two who
s

MEEK HERITAGE

258

had gone into the house might come out any
minute; Rinne’s lights still shone, but he would
never be able to reach them and dared not
even make the attempt. Danger, danger! Juha
crept into a shed, stood his rifle in a dark corner
and listened to the approaching noise. Already
he could distinguish voices, a child’s weeping,
the wailing of a woman, and on a level with
these another kind of voice. Ah no, that was
his own shaky breathing; and the rifle was
somewhere near like am untrustworthy being
that might slip out at any moment and inf orm
on him.

Now those two are coming out of the house
and cursing because he is not there. “ Was
that old devil a Butcher? God help him, I’ll
give him an eternal bread-card.'

‘ What is going to happen to me ? Lord God
Father in Heaven!—What am I to say—I didn’t
go to Communion last summer. I’m not going
to die, not going to die! Communion—I’ll go
to Communion Service as soon as ever I’m clear
of this.’

The murmur of voices and tramp of footsteps
goes on. The voices of the two who came out
of the house have died away. Are they searching
for him? Good God, if he could only partake
of Holy Communion first, anything might then
befall him. His legs tremble with cold, hunger
makes him feel faintly sick.

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259

Long after the noise of the rabble had died
down Juha stood in his corner. His imagination
still created moving figures where the house lay.
The mistress of Paitula seemed to be flitting
about there in the company of many angry
gentlemen—of the kind that always misunder¬
stood you whatever you said to them. Timidly
Juha crept to the door of the shed, and seeing
and hearing nothing was emboldened to come
out into the yard. The night was still charged
with the recent happenings and seemed to be
waiting for a repetition of those scenes. The
lights at Rinne’s had gone out, but in the church
village, nearer Kuuskoski, lights twinkled as
though to stress that there had been no return
yet to the St. Mary’s eves of former times.

This phase with its visions of Holy Communion
passed. The rifle had remained in the shed
comer, and it was only now, as his numbed
thoughts began to dwell on the devious journey
home still before him, that Juha felt that he was
indeed involved in something criminal. If he
could only escape from the air of this house!
He started to make his way slowly down to the
ice, his ears cocked to catch the slightest sound,
so that in case of need he could dash back to
his rifle. He had never fired a shot in all his
life, and would not fire one now; only some
instinct seemed to warn him that at this moment
he would be safer with a rifle if any peril threat-

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260

ened, and his position would be clearer. Half¬
way down the bank the suspicion visited his
mind that this must be where they took the
master of Paitula. No, he would not part from
his rifle. He went back to the shed at a run,
groped for his weapon and then went more
boldly down the bank.

Something black loomed in the snow where
the bank and the ice met. Juha approached it,
carrying his rifle; the surrounding night seemed
to exhort him to do so, as though anxious on its
behalf to exhibit that black object to him.
Solemnity and curiosity mingled with the terror
in his mind. He can see it clearly now; it lies
on its back, its neck stretched backward, its
chest and stomach boldly curving. Its right
arm is raised as in sleep; its left flung straight
out on the snow.

The master of Paitula; a little while ago he
was at Rinne’s and spoke those words. No
thought of murder or of the murderer enters
Juha’s head; what he dreads is that gentleman.
He seems to see the dead gentleman’s brains on
the ice in all their aggravating, overwhelming
greatness.

Juha was terribly afraid and his mind instinc¬
tively sought to defend itself: e I am looking at
a corpse, I suppose I can look at a corpse?
Anybody who might come along would look first
of all at the corpse.’

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26l

Juha glanced fearfully around as though other
spectators were already gathering. The dead
gentleman and his brains receded again into the
background. The dim night seemed to be ask¬
ing him: ‘Dare you continue farther? You
have a long way to go across open country before
you can reach your own woods; once there you
are safe enough. And your rifle, where are you
going to put that? ’

Juha made a detour round the body, and
stretching out his arm let the rifle fall beside it
as though in obedience to an unspoken order—
and then ran. A shot echoed from Kuuskoski.
Juha panted across the ice, off the trodden
track, making for the spot where the road cut
into the opposite bank. A nameless danger was
at his shoulder, and all he could think of in self-
defence was that he left his rifle beside the body.
He has only one aim: home, back, back to the
past. The children and his dead wife flash into
his mind, a peaceful picture of a fine Sunday
morning ... all will still turn out well.

At that moment he slipped and fell; the old
rupture broke out anew, his eyes watered with
the pain. Two angry shots crackle from Kuus¬
koski way. What have I done to you, for you
to harry me like this? .. . I’m a good Social-
Temocrat. . . - Juha rests on the ice.

A new stream of fugitives pouring along the
beaten track across the ice made him sit up and

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262

listen. The sound gave him so much new con¬
fidence that he was able to rise to his feet and
start off again towards the road. His rifle is
far behind him now. Some one will find it and
for the life of him will not be able to understand
how it came to be there.

At two in the morning, exhausted by his
exertions, Juha reached the cabin. He had not
been home for a week, and when Lempi let
him in the stuffy night smell of his house was
like a welcome to him. He lit the lamp and
gazing round the room saw the miserable little
evidences of the children’s unskilled attempts at
housekeeping. They had obviously tried to cook
themselves hot meals the best they could. The
butter he had brought home from Rinne’s on
his last visit had not been put into the keg and
covered with salt water as it should have been;
its remains, stuck to the paper in which he had
wrapped it, were here and there on the table
in the midst of potato-skins and the remains of
pickled sprats. The children huddled under
their patched and torn bedclothes on their straw
bed. The room was chilly; the children were
not very good at fetching fuel—green, snow-
covered faggots—from the forest.

This atmosphere of destitution, however,
familiar throughout a lifetime, brought comfort to
Juha that night. The knowledge that all that

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263

messing about in the parish was now over for good
soothed his numbed heart; no need ever to go
trapesing about any more. He had been—well,
he had tried to be—and this was how it turned
out. He would have to make a new start now.

After routing out something to eat, Juha fell
asleep in the pious belief that a new life would
now begin for all concerned without further
ado.

And a new life did begin in the parish as soon
as day had dawned. Moods and views that had
been all-powerful while they lasted were suddenly
swept away and entirely forgotten. From the
villages farmers dressed in their best furs set out
to drive to the church village, where they were to
be seen standing about everywhere, in the parish
hall, in the school-house, in the Young People’s
building. If the attitude of some of them towards
the recent situation had in all secrecy been more
or less ambiguous, there w r as no doubting their
whole-hearted acceptance of the new situation.
Prisoners of all ages and appearances had already
been brought in from various parts of the parish,
and in the grey dawn a few had already paid in
full for their misdeeds. Many a soft-hearted
farmer was inwardly queasy at first at this rapid
method of dealing out justice; the news that
old so-and-so had been shot gave them a shock.
But soon even the timidest had become acclima-

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264

tized and were trying to outshine others in cool¬
ness. News was whispered airily, laughingly. .

A neutral spectator might have found it most
amusing to watch those workers who had kept
apart from the Revolution; there were men of
this kind in cabins here and there in the parish.
They had tried their best to be cautious in their
speech, but for people at their stage of develop¬
ment the task of hiding one’s true feelings is apt
to be too difficult, and all too often remarks had
escaped them which now troubled their con¬
sciences. Greatly silent, with eyes starting out of
their heads, they tried to attract as little attention
as possible. Many farmers had, it is true, let
fall worse observations during the war; they had
given bribes to the Reds and played the informer;
but that was altogether a different matter, for it
would never enter anybody’s head to suspect a
landowner of revolutionary sympathies. But if
one happened to be a labourer and had been
at all free with one’s tongue, there was cause for
anxiety. Such men made haste to present them¬
selves to the conscription officers, and their
wives kept discreetly out of sight. Several such
women, however, were arrested and sent off
north, and the rest were all the more terified every
time the shadow of a Civic Guard fell on their
windows.

The murder of the master of Paitula was
quickly cleared up. A rifle was discovered beside

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265

the body, and at Rhine’s house, which to all
appearances had been deserted in a hurry, a list
of the rifles issued was found. The list showed the
rifle in question to have belonged to Johan
Toivola.—“ So it’s that old scarecrow’s work.”—
The mistress of Paitula moreover testified to
having seen Toivola at their gate on the night of
the murder.

Even Juha’s brain is clearer in the morning than
at night. No sooner had he woke up than he
grasped that all was not yet plain sailing for him.
Visitors might be expected at the cabin at any
time.

As he sat in the room his glance kept falling on
the door. But in that wall there was no window,
and he could not see the path; he found occasion
to go out into the yard at very brief intervals.
The cow was well supplied with hay that morn¬
ing; it was groomed and the byre floor was
thoroughly cleared of dung. Rarely had there
been such activity in that quarter as to-day.
And still no one asking for Juha.

c They’ll have found the rifle by now beside the
body,’ he thought. ‘Was it a good thing I left
it there or bad? Anyhow it would have been
worse if I had left it in the shed comer.’ But
then the thought occurred to Juha that no
gentleman or farmer would have done such a
thing; the very idea would never have entered
their heads. And now when some young gentle-

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266

man finds it, he’ll feel puzzled and laugh, scenting
in it some silly countryman’s wheeze that he
would never be able to fathom. Juha Toivola
and a young gentleman! A more discordant,
more ludicrous, more unpalatable contrast would
be hard to imagine. Juha himself has been
deeply aware of it all his life.

Yet life does sometimes stage such tasteless
contrasts, as though intentionally making use of
them to point certain hidden wordless truths.
In the late afternoon two healthy-complexioned,
white-toothed youths drew near to Juha’s cabin,
guided by the young master of Pirjola. Juha
saw them from the byre window when they were
already at the gate. He had an opportunity to
study their faces unobserved, and he felt his heart
stand still. They represented something new.
Juha had hitherto had no clear picture of the
enemy in his mind. He thought of them vaguely
as sons of gentlemen and farmers, but while
doing so he saw them not as an organized whole,
but as fairly negligible beings on the opposing
side, as individuals of a fairly low order of brains.
But these—these wore uniform caps, belts and
straps; behind them loomed the whole social
order Juha had never really been able to stomach.
They have got him now; best stay in the byre
until they hale him out. He recollects: ‘ I was
on guard outside Paitula; the hay here is
Pirjola’s.’

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267

He heard the master of Pirjola come to the
hayshed and say, “ Ay, this hay is from my
farm.”

“ Has he robbed you of it? ” one of the
strangers asked in correct, stiff accents.

“ I should say he has.”

The other young man had meanwhile gone into
the house and seen the various signs of poverty,
though not with the same feelings as Juha.

“ Where’s your father? ” he asked the girl.

“ Don’t know.”

“ How don’t you know that? ”

The girl tries to think of an answer, but fails.

The stranger turned to the boy and asked him:
“ Do you know where father is ? ”

“ No.”

“ Has he been here to-day ? ”

“ Yes.”

“ Well, how is it you don’t know where he is
now? ”

The stranger spoke in a sharper tone and took
a step towards the boy. The boy burst into
tears.

“ All right, all right, don’t cry. I’m not going
to eat you.”

While this was going on Juha stood pressed so
close to the byre wall that when Pirjola opened
the door all he could make out at first was the
cow. Soon, however, he detected the un¬
pleasantly familiar staring eyes of the man he

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268

sought, and anger and high spirits mingled in his
tone as he shouted, “ Here he is, in here! ”

The man who had been in the house came
hurrying up to look through the doorway. Juha
saw his handsome face and the soldierlike upper
part of his body, and heard the clearly enunciated
words, “ Come out of that.”

Juha made towards the door and then halted
again, for his captors filled the doorway. The
expression on the young soldiers’ faces was that of
men compelled to handle a loathsome animal.

“ Well, do you hear, come out.”

Juha came out, his head trembling, his eyes
starting from his head. Pirjola said, in a familiar
tone because of the strangers:

“ Come along now, Juha, to headquarters,
though I’m not guaranteeing what’s going to
happen to you there.”

On the way one of the soldiers asked, “ Was it
you who killed the master of Paitula? ”

“ No, it wasn’t me, though I were to be shot
on this very spot, no . . . nothing to do
with it . . .” Juha blew his nose agitatedly.

“ And where is your rifle? ”

“ My rifle’s there, I know . . . but I
wasn’t. . . .”

“ You can explain all that at headquarters.”

The party marched on in silence. Juha tried to
calculate how much bread, sprats, wood and hay
there was at home—if Pirjola sends for his hay

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269

the cow will starve. And what is going to become
of the boy? The girl will of course go into service
somewhere. Hiltu’s fate came into his mind;
tears started rolling down his cheeks. This trip
can only mean death ... he will never again
come back along this fence. . . . He has never
been able to finish anything all his life; he has
lived with a wife, farmed a croft, been a Socialist;
at bottom it has all been the same kind of thing.
He has done these things because he had to do
them—and now he has to die—and the children
still helpless. They too are not like other people’s
children, but like the work of one who doesn’t
rightly know how. . . .

They come to the open village lands, and Juha
sees the houses in the gathering dusk as though
a dozen years had passed since he last saw them.
He knows clearly now that he is going to be killed;
a hot wave of emotion eases the tension of his
mind and causes a new gush of water from his
eyes and nose. His legs are tired, but weariness
is now a strange intoxication. At the back of his
softened mood is an ever stronger sense of his
past life, a despairing feeling of incapacity. If
the sixty-year-old child of old Penjami Nikkila
and his maid Maija had had a highly-developed
intelligence he might, on these last kilometres of
his pilgrimage, have found a cool consolation in
the circumstances of his past life. Now they
merely crumble away as it were under the flow of

MEEK HERITAGE

27O

tears, and departing brush past his ever softer
sensibilities.

More houses yet to be passed. Some of them
teem with soldiers—even in his private mind
Juha could not think of them as Butchers. Dozens
of horses are picketed in the yards. At one house a
sleigh and a new escort were provided for him.
He felt ever more strongly that he would never be
an inhabitant of this new world. If they would
only get it over quickly and not torture him.
Recollections of the children and the cow stab
at his heart—the desire to weep is now con¬
tinuous. . . .

Johan Toivola’s case was clear already before
the trial. He had taken part in criminal activities
right to the last—the latest instance was the
robbery of those rugs—and he had obviously
played an important part in the murder of the
master of Paitula, although even the keenest
prosecutor, after one glance at the man, must
have felt some doubt as to whether the old fellow
had had any concern in the actual shooting. And
there was not a single person in the whole com¬
munity who felt the slightest sympathy for him.
A few farmers who saw him being taken under
arrest to prison were unwillingly moved to pity
him. But the pity went against their grain, and
oncepast him they were relieved to knowthat they
need never have anything more to do with Juha

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and his affairs. Their attitude was that of the
man who manages to be away from home when
there is slaughtering to be done, but on his return
looks approvingly at the neady cut up meat.

Juha shivered in body and soul when he arrived
at his prison quarters. He tried to assure himself
that he would be shot already that night; he
was constandy imagining what the impact of the
bullet would be like. Meanwhile his lips babbled
an incoherent prayer and he had no attention left
for his surroundings. The room was so tightly
packed that it was impossible for all of them to
lie down. A constant coughing and spitting
came from every side. As the hours wore on the
expectation of death became intenser. Many
prayed that God would take their lives before their
fellow-men could do so. The young hooligans
looked ludicrous now that gravity sat uninvited
on their animal-like features. One of them tried
to engage the guard in conversation.

“ You won’t all be killed,” remarked the guard
with a careless smile.

The night wore on, and still nobody was taken
out to be shot. Towards morning first one and
then another fell into a doze, and soon only
sleepy murmurs, coughs, and an occasional
“ Lord God, Heavenly Father ” were heard.
Some snored: a young hooligan can sleep soundly
even in those conditions.

After dawn several new prisoners were brought

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272

into the room. They tried to pick their way over
the sleepers to the window, but the guard forbade
them and ordered them to keep beside the wall.

“ Dear is the ransom of blasted liberty,” said
one of the newcomers.

No one got very much sleep, and all were
convinced they hadn’t had a wink. Even the
briefest doze, however, is a barrier between
yesterday and to-day. In the morning they all
knew by instinct that no one was to be shot before
evening. The long day with its examinations
was ahead.

At half-past eight the Field Judge, the Com¬
mandant and the local Civic Guard commander
were drinking their morning coffee. They were
all in a high state of nerves, on the point of quar¬
relling among themselves, for everything was still
in a muddle and they had a trying day before
them. All kinds of things were needed, and
there was nothing. The large numberof prisoners
was bothersome. There was no settled procedure
for dealing with them. Some had been released
on the guarantee of local farmers, some shot by
the men on their own responsibility, the shoe¬
makers among them had immediately been put
to work. All day farmers kept on bringing in
women and odd characters for examination, and
a man would come, for instance, to demand a
receipt for a telephone which the soldiers had

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273

taken for their own purposes. It was all so
irritating that the Commandant and the Judge
were constantly relapsing into Swedish, although
the local commander spoke only Finnish.

The worst problem is what to do with the
prisoners.

“ We’ll have to start off with those that will
have to be shot,” said the Judge.

“ Oh, we don’t need a trial to give every
Staff hooligan his eternal bread-card,” remarked
the Commandant.

“ Yes, but the Devil only knows which of them
are Staff hooligans.”

These two widely differing mental states—that
of the prisoners and that of the headquarters
gentlemen—came into the closest contact with
each other from nine o’clock onwards. The
Judge is in an energetic humour and business
proceeds rapidly to-day. By evening forty
prisoners have been sent off northward and nine
are ready for execution.

Those under the death sentence are taken to a
separate little building on the far side of the
yard. Two soldiers with fixed bayonets and hand
grenades at their belts are set to guard them.
The names of those confined in this building leak
out during the day among the local soldiery.
The store-keeper of the co-operative stores is
one: well, you could have guessed that—Alviina

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274

Kulmala and Manta Virtanen: fancy those two
women—-Juha Toivola: so he’s there; that
means more mouths for the parish to feed.

In the little building the nine wait for night.
Some of the women are passing through a phase
of calmness; one asks the guard what time it is.

“ Thinking of going anywhere? ” the guard
asks in return.

The guards are changed. Again someone asks
a guard whether it isn’t tiring to stand on guard.

“ Thank you for asking, but well soon be
relieved. The officer’s come already.”

“ Is the officer going to take a turn? ”

“ He asked to be given the last turn.”

No one felt like asking any more.

Two ignorant young human beings have spent
their second night of terror far away in a miserable
forest shack. In the evening the girl had run all
the way to the distant nearest neighbour to ask
whether they had heard anything about father.
But there was no one in the house, and sobbing
and panting she jogged back through the forest.
The boy was crying in the dark cabin, and to¬
gether they prepared to endure another dreadful
night. They had always been quarrelling with
each other, and father had beaten them. But now
the picture of his old bald head and the bristling
fringe below it was ever before their eyes. Their
terrified weeping brought to the surface the

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subconscious instincts deep down in their blood.
The simile of a captured bird and young birds
left unprotected in a nest may provoke a smile,
so deadly appropriate as it is.

It was indeed an old bird that sat in the
corner of the prison building, his hands clasped
around his knees, his head nodding. He has had
pains in his chest all day and been short of breath.
He has been before a judge, but remembers
nothing of what was said. Memories of events
along the path of his life dance past his con¬
sciousness. The first nights with his wife—he
was happy, after all, in those days. And then
Hiltu’s fate; as he now w T atches the successive
phases of Hiltu’s life since her childhood, he sees
them as one continuous journey towards the
moonlit night on which she walked into the lake.
The vision is so vivid that it never enters Juha’s
mind to think why it has chosen this moment to
appear to him. He only goes on nodding his
head, and before long he sees the phases of his
own life as a similar consecutive journey. . . .

A low-toned voice says “ Come out.” And
Juha’s mind trembles back into the present and
starts off on quite a different track. Such
departures as this were common in the War of
Independence.

The last to pass through the cemetery gate was
Juha Toivola. The others, younger in years,

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276

hastened on almost at a run; only the pot-bellied
storekeeper lagged behind to keep Juha company.

Cold, hunger and lack of sleep have done old
Juha good. The pain in his chest has gone and
he can breathe now without difficulty; at least
he is less aware of bodily discomfort. His
trembling too has become unconscious and his
thoughts are as though held together within a
ring which remains moveless all the while thou¬
sands upon thousands of tiny sensations fiercely
jostle each other. This goes on as long as any¬
thing continuous is happening, as when the party
marches on without new orders. But as soon as
anything special happens, however slight, as
when the officer pushes the iron gate wider open,
or when he turns to look behind and the barrel
of his rifle swings in the darkness, a pang of weary
despair shoots through Juha. Not a piercing
pang, but rather as though someone were striking
at bis vitals with a leather ball.

The long line of graves dug in the sand comes
into sight. “ Halt! ” The front ranks stop,
but those behind still take a few steps. Then they
stand at ease, breathing audibly; one of the
prisoners collapses to his hands and knees, but
no one says anything. The ring around Juha’s
thoughts has vanished, he is drawn irresistibly to
the ground, but manages to stand. He begins
to have the same feeling as once after he had
partaken of Holy Communion when he was ill.

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277

And isn’t it a fact that he has been quite recently
to Communion ? He remembers plainly standing
in the corner of the shed at Paitula in the happy
past, but after that everything is a blank. Justice
and injustice, guilt and innocence, are questions
altogether alien to this situation, to this state of
mind. They have no place even on the farthest
outskirts of his consciousness. ‘ What dress was
Hiltu wearing when she left home, in the sun¬
shine? Yes, that was it, and those were the
boots she wore.’

Juha’s senses register what is happening. The
pot-bellied storekeeper has been fetched without
a word from behind the others, told to take off his
shoes and clothes; he is doing that now. Now he
steps down into the grave, the sand yields a little
under his feet. An angry suspense—rac nic-nac
rac tr-rac—the breech-locks rattle. A long,
long silence, during which the crushing sense of
something unnatural happening reaches a climax .
The crash of fire is a tremendous relief. After
the first execution is over, everything proceeds
easier.

The next man is ordered to undress, step down
into the grave—and so on. The shots crash out,
trying in vain to arouse benumbed minds.
Apparently there is to be no hero in this batch.
The women keep up a tremulous noise that is
not weeping, but probably the earliest primitive
squealing of the dam parted from its cubs. Their

278 MEEK HERITAGE

unavailing prayers and kneelings are long ago
over.

It happened that our old unsavoury friend Juha
was last. He was still so far conscious as to
notice this and derive a kind of dull emotion from
the fact. He was also quite convinced that he
had just partaken of Holy Communion; he
mumbled ceaselessly to himself: “ Lord Jesus
take my spirit.” He hesitated a little before
taking off his trousers, for his drawers were very
raggy (a slipshod fellow like him would naturally
have neglected to replenish his wardrobe from the
Red Guard stores) and also, as a result of what he
had gone through, a little—Nevertheless, he
opened his belt and slipped out of his trousers.
“ Lord Jesus take my spirit, Lord Jesus take my
spirit.”

At the bottom of the grave a fairly large pool
of blood had collected when Juha stepped down
into it in his tattered socks. A grateful languor
led him unwittingly to lay himself down on the
pile of corpses. The edges of the grave showed
dark against the faintly glowing sky. Then a
shudder robbed his languor of its charm. A
clenched fist pressed uncomfortably on the back
of his neck.

For a second he has forgotten what is before
him, but the next minute the commanding voice
of the officer bids him get to his feet. In mo¬
ments of stress men instinctively obey an order.

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279

Juha struggles painfully to his feet, and holding
up his ragged under-garments Juha Toivola is
blown into the mighty all-embracing state of
being known as death without a “ last thought ”
of any kind.

His sufferings, which surely help in an invisible
ledger to swell the credit account of the people of
whose collective entity he knew nothing, were
longer and greater than those of many—perhaps
of any—on whom so much pity is expended.

The officer and his men already march far
away from the graveyard. The life of Johan
Toivola has reached its natural end; there
remains only the usual valediction. But it is
hard to find anything weighty enough for that
purpose, for Juha met his death while the storm
raged over Finland at its worst and the rest of
mankind was still passionately trying to guess
what the happiness was that it was straining with
so much labour to achieve. Were one gifted
with second sight one might perhaps learn some¬
thing if on this dim night one were to steal to
the graveyard, descend into the grave beside the
pool of blood and the pile of corpses, and there
listen to the silence.

It is by no means certain that one’s dominating
sensation would be horror. Spring hovers already
in the graveyard trees and in the air, promising

280 meek heritage

once again bird-song and the scent of flowers
and to the growing generation days full of bliss.
Ever nearer they advance towards that happiness,
the definition of which has occupied manVinrl f or
centuries. To-day they still believe that the
physical body and its demands, the community,
and other such matters are in the closest con¬
nection with that happiness. But granted that
conceptions still move on this low plane, time is
long. And already we have come so far that most
people, at the moment of their death, do ex¬
perience a flash of it; it is precisely that which
gives a nocturnal graveyard such a homogeneous
atmosphere once we have grasped this circum¬
stance. And some day, as the existence of
mankind continues, it will yet spread into the
kingdom of the living.